


You can drown in a dream

by pushdragon



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Imaginary alpha/omega, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-04 16:24:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3074315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waking up from an extraction on an erotica writer, something serious is wrong with Arthur.  He can't focus, he can't sleep ... and when did Eames start to smell so good? Even as he writes his report describing the writer's fictitious alpha/omega dynamics, it doesn't occur to him that the description kind of applies to him. (Or: the one where Arthur incepts himself into believing he's an omega.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"I'm not risking frostbite for the sort of fee you could tuck into a stripper's waistband." 

It was recurring moments of vertigo that made Eames bitter. And the flesh-stripping winter wind. And the complete lack of shelter offered by the foot-thick steel struts that surrounded them. "If the recon isn't wrapped by Friday, the client can put on a woolly hat and take over the field work in person."

He'd be a hypocrite to admit it now, after the lacerating debrief he'd provided in the aftermath of the Fischer debacle, but there was something to be said for clients who were sufficiently committed to the job to put their body on the line as part of the team.

Arthur was apparently as immune to cold as he was to Eames's unhappy barbs.

"No tourists on the frontline. Never again. You said it yourself."

"This is hardly the frontline," Eames objected glumly. "This is a high-level role in international communications technology."

By which he meant that they were thirty metres in the air, in the pitch darkness, crammed into the tiny crawl space at the top of the only telephone tower for miles around, from where they were hoping against hope to catch sight of their famously reclusive mark doing something - anything - that they could work with. When Eames glanced down, the lone silhouette was exactly where it had been for the last sixty minutes, perched at a desk in the only lit room of the house. 

Arthur scrambled around and shoved something metallic into his grasp that, upon examination, turned out to be a thermos full of strong tea that steamed invitingly the instant the lid came off. Eames was mollified despite himself - temporarily, at least.

"I take it the client's not much of a thrill seeker then. Anyone with a real pair would have come along for the experience."

Arthur checked the settings on his camera, pointed it towards the mark's continuing inaction, and hung it back on the bolt above his head. "You didn't read the brief then?" he replied with more resignation than reproach. 

An icy drop slithered down the beam above and dripped down the back of Eames's neck.

"I was hardly given the luxury of time." 

Arthur had the grace to look chastened by that, as he ferretted the house plans out of his backpack and reviewed them, reflected torchlight deepening the frown lines on his forehead. 

Eames watched him flick off the torch, check a detail on the cottage through the magnification of his camera lens, and sketch a correction onto the paper copy. For the two days of the job, he'd been going out of his way to fill their professional interaction with these little demonstrations of his meticulous attention to detail. As if to prove that he was going to be just as ruthless on himself as he'd been with Eames. Or perhaps, through some microscopic chink in his fortress of smug hyper-competency, he'd managed to glimpse how deeply the Fischer job had dented his reputation. 

For all his lack of imagination, Arthur had always been a safe pair of hands, the counterbalance that kept Cobb's improvisational brilliance within sustainable limits and held the job together, whatever it took. In Mombasa, that was what had overcame Eames's doubts about the knife-edge desperation he could practically smell under Cobb's suave act, and convinced him to put his sanity on the line: the quality guarantee that came with Arthur's stick-in-the-mud stewardship. And yet somehow, beyond the reach of Arthur's sleepless nights of research, beyond his forensic knowledge of the industry, somebody had militarised Robert Fischer and not left a trace. It put a new slant on things, knowing that.

"Seventeen minutes past three." Arthur's soft voice roused him a long while later. Eames slid one numb hand into the meagre warmth under his arm and wriggled his toes painfully. The light in the study had finally been extinguished, and so, at last, had the bedroom lamp. 

"Still no routine then." 

Arthur jerked the zip of his bag closed. "We'll have to keep the timing flexible and wait for an opportunity."

"Flexible," Eames repeated sourly. "In other words, we're going in without a plan. And to think I gave up a week in the Marina Bay Sands for this." 

Arthur crawled past him and eased his feet onto the ladder, moving stiffly.

"The rungs are wet," he said, disappearing into the dark without a glance back at Eames. "Take it easy on the way down." 

**

There was frost on the windows when Eames woke up the next morning. The cold of the floorboards was biting even through his socks. But the battered ex-army sleeping bags Arthur had equipped them with had done their job, and the residual warmth from a snug night's sleep stayed with him as he crossed the cabin.

There was a disconcerting sense of familiarity in the unforgiving cold, the hard-won pockets of warmth, and the solitude he could practically taste in the air. He hadn't dwelt in silence like this for years - not since he'd escaped to London and lost himself in loud music and bad company. The memory was naggingly unpleasant.

In the main room, Lin, their chemist, looked up from the gauges on the PASIV to wish him good morning before she went back to her notes.

Arthur was unconscious on a towel spread over the dusty carpet, with a line trailing from under one rolled up sleeve. He looked like he always did: like an overworked young professional snatching a quick kip on his homeward tube journey, who might wake up any moment with a brilliant new foreign exchange hedge planned out in his mind and ready to pitch. He looked like the defencelessness of sleep was a highly temporary state.

"How's the Professor?" Eames asked. "I heard it pretty clear that he's gone over to the dark side."

Lin made a disapproving noise as she checked the gauge and updated her records. "Just a contract," she said. "The money was too good to refuse. He trained their management team in sub-conscious security, and made a couple million in insider trading from the expansion plans he extracted while he was under."

"That's my boy."

Lin had been his pick. In an unexpected act of contrition, Arthur had agreed to let him veto the original chemist and choose the third and final member of their team. Lin had run petrochemical projects for China Development Bank before she succumbed to the illicit lure of dreamshare, and demanded almost complete autonomy on any jobs she worked. Arthur said she was not a team player, which meant that her dislike of military style hierarchies made her a bad fit for the sort of team Arthur liked to run, but then it was practically a certainty that he said the same thing about Eames. Eames liked her because she'd never risen to any of his provocations, except to throw the occasional unamused glance his way. When irritated, she called him "darling" in the same dry tone she might have used to say "pre-commencement checklist" or "toenail clippings".

"I heard it pretty clear you quit for good."

Under her unfaltering look, he turned his urge to wince into a grin. "Nothing's for good in this business."

She turned away as if he'd answered her question, her attention sliding over Arthur's sleeping face just as he started to stir and wake.

He was already frowning before he clocked Eames standing to the side. "It's too sober in there."

"Are you sure that's not just you, Arthur?" Eames asked sweetly.

"I could have built St Peter's Cathedral, from the ground up, and not got a brick out of place. I didn't even feel sleepy."

Lin's voice grew steely. "The mix already has twenty percent more narcotic than the base formula."

"Then it needs more," Arthur shot back. "Bump it up to fifty. We know she's notoriously tight about sharing her ideas. We need her to show us everything she's got. She has to loosen up. End of discussion."

Her brief but idly murderous glance at Arthur's retreating back gave him pleasure. It was satisfying to be stirring up friction between them so early in the piece. Twenty heavily wooded miles from the nearest town, he had to find something to do for entertainment.

Eames had quit dreamshare for good, that was true. Chosen the risk of gut wounds and imprisonment over slow death by mental disintegration. Chemistry had no mercy. You couldn't negotiate with it while your body, in real time, remained in a helpless state of paralysis. At its most sophisticated, extraction was barely more than grown men and women bumbling about with high-tech toys and amateur psychology until they got lucky. The twin blows of Yusuf's double-cross and Arthurs' research slip-up had tarnished his confidence in the industry even further. 

Still, he liked to play in the most exciting game in town, so never didn't have to mean never. He'd anticipated letting himself be seduced into the occasional cameo role in a juicy high-stakes project, sought out like a reclusive legend. He'd even been prepared for Arthur to be the first one to come courting him. He hadn't been prepared to find himself threatened, tricked and then blackmailed into accepting a job that barely piqued his interest. 

"Nicely handled," he told Arthur chirpily as he lifted the boiling kettle off its base and helped himself to the entire contents. "Precisely the sort of top-notch teamwork you've made such a success of in the past."

**

Arthur shifted to feel the pliers in his pocket dig into his hip. It was dark, outside the spill of light from the gatepost, and very still. There was the faint creak of Eames tugging the rope that led up the side of the wall in another round of checking that a confident, seasoned professional should not need to make. The phone in Arthur's other pocket remained lifeless. Another minute, and the message still did not come.

When it came to the business end of the job, Arthur would have liked to chuck the whole team out and do it himself, if only he could. Relying on other people was torture. The worst kind of powerlessness. And with the high attrition rate in their trade and Cobb now out for good, more and more often he'd be relying on virtual strangers from here on in.

Sascha had come to him by way of tenuous reference from an amphetamines specialist he barely trusted. She dabbled in high-end personal training, sold vitamin supplements from a constantly shifting website, and took random odd jobs when her drug debts got on top of her. Her brief was simple. In the guise of an upper-storey tenant, she needed to get into the building that housed the security firm which took the feed from the cameras here, back in the city, and distract the night shift staff. All Arthur needed was a two minute window to get over the wall and disable the alarm systems. Both alarm systems, as it happened. The mark's publishers had compensated heavily for their star writer's refusal to allow security guards in her home. 

On his tablet, Arthur checked the readings from the thermal imaging camera Eames had smuggled into the house in the box of flowers he delivered yesterday. It was enough to detect, through the narrow angle of bedroom doorway, her lower legs.

"She's out this time," he whispered, as Eames leaned over for a second opinion. Tension made them both breathe lightly as they waited, willing her to stay in deep sleep.

They'd had to work around a mark's unorthodox sleeping patterns before, but this one had him stumped. Rather than easing gradually down into stiller phases of sleep, she would drop into complete paralysis almost as soon as her head hit the pillow. Then, after a half an hour of motionlessness, she would rouse herself, toss and turn, and then begin the slow descent into deep unconsciousness. Her last movement had been twenty minutes ago. It looked like she was out cold this time. 

"All right," Eames nodded at last. "That's good enough for me."

A moment later, Arthur's phone vibrated in his pocket, and then the three of them were up over the wall, moving swiftly through the garden towards their target. Eames had the screws out of a garage roof panel in a matter of seconds, then it was just a matter of crawling across the main rafter and, hanging by his legs, gently prising open the case of the alarm pad just far enough to kill the system with a snip of pliers.

Disabling the hub for the interior system took a little more time and the full armada of gadgetry in Lin's backpack, but not long afterwards he was dropping down onto the kitchen counter and scouting out the adjoining rooms.

Above him, only the occasional faint shuffle announced Eames crawling through the roof space, pushing the PASIV case in front of him. Arthur eased the kitchen door closed to mask any stray sounds. Having Eames on board had its upside. What he'd lost, when Hollywood Jane came down with dengue fever after a job in Thailand, was a sophisticated build with an extra level and four separate forgeries, and about three nights' sleep re-working a stripped-back plan that Eames could get on top of in two days. What he'd gained was the knowledge that, if it ended in a shoot-out with armed security guards, he had Eames at his back. 

He climbed back onto the counter as Eames passed the case down then lowered himself inch by inch from those impressive biceps until his feet touched the counter. 

As the three of them unwound the lines and readied the machine, Arthur channeled his pounding adrenalin into quick, precise action. 

He could not afford for this job to fail. No matter what, he had to get it over the line. The last year made for a shitty resume. First, the failed extraction on Saito, which their angry clients had complained scathingly about throughout the industry. Then the blindingly successful extraction on Fischer, which they couldn't exactly advertise. Cobb was gone. The competition got stronger by the year, and it was the corporate militarisation specialists who dominated the trade now, with their merchant bank styling and ex-Ivy League networks. Extractors like Arthur were left to risk mind and body on the wrong side of the law, for a quarter of the money. 

And if Arthur botched this job, he'd have to go begging for the chance at even that. 

"Careful," Arthur breathed as Eames picked up the case while Lin grasped the lines. His torchlight had caught the gloss of blood on the knob of Eames's wristbone, knocked on some corner or loose nail as they crawled in. A wealth of DNA that would be hard to miss on the pale grey tiles. Arthur thumbed it away and pulled down Eames's sleeve to cover it.

With stakes this high, Arthur needed Eames on this job. He could not afford any more secret agendas or betrayals. Eames always made him pay extra, with a thousand little insults, pointless acts of rebellion, constant jabs at Arthur's competence. But Arthur would endure that. Because once the job was on, Eames always came through. Even on Fischer, he may have threatened to walk, but when it became clear that they were stuck, he had absorbed the new rules of play with his usual speed, and got down to the business of getting them out intact. Eames was not only a natural born forger, he was one of the few in the business who was utterly dependable. He could be a bastard to work with, every hour of the job, but Arthur had an unshakable confidence that Eames would never screw him over. 

"Everything ready?" Arthur asked.

Lin murmured her confirmation. Eames's business-like, "All in order" had none of the playful anticipation he'd glimpsed on other jobs, when the stakes were higher.

"Then let's go."

Creeping into her room in the darkness, tripping over the unexpected suitcase by her bedside, and finding a vein by torchlight in the split second before she woke up, was every bit the heart-in-mouth nightmare they had expected. 

But it turned out that was the easy part.

**

The main dream level that Arthur had spent days perfecting started to fall to pieces from the moment he opened his eyes.

None of the perspective lines in the neoclassical Library of Congress ran where they should. The fluted columns around the walls curved one way then another. The rows of bookshelves stretching out in front of them seemed as tall as trees. At the same time, the sunlight broke through the dome three storeys up in rays that crossed each other at higgledy-piggledy angles. 

"Tranquilisers in the system," Eames voiced his diagnosis as the floor beneath them lurched like a raft on rough seas, or a collapsing scaffold. "It's like moving in mud."

"Press on," Arthur told him. "It won't show in the readings, but if there's a pill bottle lying around out there, Lin will work it out and compensate."

The arched doorway beside them receded far away, becoming small as a mousehole, then snapped back into true perspective between one blink and the next. He dropped down on one knee, eyes closed, until he got the dizziness under control. "A recent dose, most likely. It's going to get worse before it gets better. So let's pick up the pace here. You get your face on while I go and find her."

Eames moved towards the mirrors of the gentlemen's bathroom to slip into the skin of a revered poet, who they were fairly confident the mark had never met for long enough to spot the fakery in the time it took to bestow an award on her. Arthur glanced up with foreboding at the three floors of shelving that ran around the atrium beneath the dome, housing thousands upon thousands of books, and one writer whose thoughts he needed to break into. 

He glimpsed her on the stairs and set off in pursuit. It was like fighting a gale as he shoved his way through the stiff opposition of the dream, but above him, the mark seemed to be ascending with effortless curiosity, towards the top level where they had not planned to take her until the end. 

By the time he had followed his own carefully constructed lighting plan to reach the aisle which housed her works, she was already leafing through her debut novel, the kinky thriller that had blasted her into number one spot on three continents at once. Her face was curiously detached, concealing the pride she should have felt. Perhaps that was the effect of the strict lines of her trademark square black glasses. 

Her expression was equally reserved as she looked up at his approach.

"Bit of a dark horse," had been Eames's impression after delivering the flowers. "Not much you can see on the surface."

The description perfectly fit the way she was assessing Arthur.

"Ms St Clair," he said, grasping at the threads of a new plan while his mouth struggled with the simple task of speaking. "We have a few more minutes before I need to take you downstairs for the award ceremony. Feel free to look around."

Her nod was guarded, and through the window, Arthur saw the change as the milling projections outside moved purposefully towards the front door. She glanced back at the book, nothing but a flimsy prop, built from a few key extracts copied over and over again in Arthur's memory. There should have been two of them here to direct her attention where it needed to go, and keep her from seeing the flaws.

The lights overhead flickered and dimmed. Underfoot, the burgundy office-grade carpet had turned thick and unkempt, the colour bleeding out to grey as the sedative spread through the PASIV system into Arthur's veins. He'd never felt this kind of fear before, the fear that he might not be able to hold the dreamscape together.

"Everything is here," he made himself smile, approaching. Though she drew back, and from downstairs came the crash of breaking glass, she followed his glance along the shelf. "The Raven Mask series. The trilogy. And of course-"

He didn't name the next book, because it was incomplete, lodged mostly inside her mind, from where he had been handsomely commissioned to steal it. 

She examined the blank paperback spine intently. When she reached out for it, as her fingers connected, white capitals sprang up on the spine. "Kingdom of Heat". Exactly on plan. Next she would open the cover and populate the pages with enough clues for Arthur to glean a few plot ideas while Eames distracted her with literary praise. 

She frowned at the page, checked the window, and swept another critical glance over Arthur - each gesture a figure in an equation whose total Arthur very much did not want her to add up. Footsteps were ascending the staircase now, dozens of them, projections moving more swiftly through the dream space than Arthur with his anchor in reality. Behind her, the books on the topmost shelf swayed and shivered.

"It certainly lives up to its reputation," Arthur told her. The tremor was growing; he could feel it in his ankles now like the first deceptive vibration of an approaching train. Sweat chilled the back of his neck as he silently fought the dizzy pull of sleep and poured his mind into holding the dream together. It was the structural core of the building that would fail first, crushed under the weight of the dome. 

"I appreciate candour," she replied in her deep, considered voice. "I expect nothing less."

A thick shower of plaster dust fell from the ceiling. Simultaneously, the metal frame of the dome gave a great, rending groan and the floor jerked one way than the other. He had seconds. No time to read the book. Only one way to buy the extra minutes he needed. He set his shoulders and the fire alarm went off urgently at full blast.

"Here," he ordered, and behind her appeared a fire extinguisher, an oxygen tank, and a silver case that Arthur had dreamed more times than he could remember. "Before the smoke catches you. Quickly."

He slipped the oxygen mask onto her and twisted the valve. Her eyes fluttered at the first breath of anaesthetic gas, and she touched the mask uselessly as she started to drift. He had the case open in an instant, prepped the needle with his fingers on autopilot. Her last glance, as she sank fully under, was not at Arthur but at the pyrex valves of the PASIV. It was a slanted glance. Calculating. Knowing.

**

Arthur was in a cobbled square. In its centre, the sundial mounted on a marble plinth was about to be put out of action by the setting sun. 

Two ivy-wreathed towers rose behind the stone cottages that lined the square. They struck Arthur as lonely and forbidding, a construction never meant for pleasure. The scene had a storybook menace behind its quaint beauty, and Arthur was certain that she'd dreamed up exactly the location he'd counted on. 

But something disconcerting still lingered. He breathed in deep. Wood smoke. Pine needles. Livestock and hay. The bite of far-off snow. And something else, something that made his pulse kick up, something he couldn't place. 

The town was as busy as the last level had been empty. A group of women leaned their washing baskets on the base of the sundial and chatted. A young boy led a contrary stallion to the east. A man cursed as his barrow of firewood caught a rut and wobbled. It was if the dream world had sprung into being fully formed. There were none of the abstract gaps and glitches of the inexperienced dreamer. And none of the projections was Arthur's, not one.

As Arthur stepped into a shadowed laneway beside a blacksmith's workshop until he could find something less conspicuous than his suit, the movement felt free and easy. They'd slipped out of the grasp of the sedative at last. 

Why, then, was his skin prickling with unease? 

He swapped his jacket for a torn brown cloak snatched from a peg on the blacksmith's wall and moved into the crowd.

"We'll know before nightfall what she means to do with him," said a woman in a blue headscarf to her companions, as if conveying a dearly bought piece of rumour. 

"Black deeds beget black rewards," replied a grey-haired woman, clucking her tongue unhappily. "His uncle sowed the field, with all the blood he spilled. And now it's the nephew's got to reap, poor lad."

It was impossible to pin them down in time and geography. Long skirts in browns, blues and reds, brighter headscarves, big gothic belt buckles - it could be anywhere in the compass of five centuries and two thousand miles, or no place that had ever been. The women wore the same pendant at their necks, a silvery shape like a figure of eight suspended on a leather thong, but it was not a symbol Arthur recognised.

The soldier who jogged into the square wore the same symbol, but highly polished and wrought of purer silver. He drew out a horn and blew it. "All hail the Royal Chancellor. Stand and hear the Empress's commands."

Flanked by two more soldiers, a tall man in black climbed onto the base of the sundial and raised his voice to reach the gathering crowd:

"It is the will of the White Castle," he proclaimed with a teasing pause. "That the traitor Prince Alexei be bonded and wed."

There was a scandalised intake of breath. "But he already—" whispered the young woman at Arthur's elbow. 

The Lord Chancellor opened his arms expansively, and the shift in his cloak revealed the gold triangle that hung at his neck. "Your Empress would not lightly bestow this prize. Good men and women, the traitor's hand will be given as a reward to one of you. Who? It will be the one who demonstrates the greatest love for our empire by finding the last of the renegade generals, so their heads can be hung from the castle gate."

A fiercely interested chatter flowed through the crowd. "—as pretty a piece of flesh as the likes of you could ever hope for," came a deep voice from behind him.

"Loyal and true subjects, your prize is waiting for you."

And with that, torchlight sprang up on the crown of the northernmost tower to illuminate a figure. A young man, barely twenty, stood shackled behind the low crenellations. Apart from the thin white robe, his only adornment was a round pendant the width of a fist, a single loop fashioned from pearly glass that sparkled in the firelight.

"I am no traitor," the young man called down to them. "And I will be no man's prize."

The grey-haired woman shook her head with a dubious murmur. "He'll be singing a different song two nights from now when the heat's got him in its grip good and proper. He'll be ready to take anyone by then, if his beau can't get to him."

"Dare say the palace guards will be scouring the hills for the traitors' bolt-hole," said a handsome woman in a black headscarf wearing the gold triangle. "Their sort'd boil their own young in a pot if Her Mightiness fancied it. Heaven only knows what they'll do for a chance to turn a royal prince into their own lawfully bonded omega."

The crowd was already beginning to drift off, talking busily. The sunset was barely more than a pale ribbon of orange along the horizon. A fat moon was starting to rise.

It happened like a fast-moving rain shower sweeping in. A slow, insistent ripple that ran over the landscape, turning one thing into another. On this side of it lay twilight; on the other side pitch blackness; and where it passed, it made changes. Arthur had seen this once or twice, when a master architect revised the dreamscape. Never in an amateur. 

There was a moment's blankness as the ripple passed through the square, through Arthur. When his senses came back to him, it was deep night, and he was alone. The moon was high in the sky, yellow and full. When he looked down, he was in a grey tunic and hose, and the cobblestones were cold through the thin leather soles of his boots.

The first thing he heard was a low, tortured moan. 

The young man on the tower made a worse sound, wretched and torn out. The helpless hunger in it caught Arthur like a fist in the belly and his blood stirred. "Please—" came the same entreaty in verbal form, through clenched teeth. "Help me. I need — I need—"

What he so badly needed was swallowed up in the clatter of wheels. Arthur stepped back as six soldiers drove a horse and cart through the square. When they turned west toward the towers, Arthur followed. 

"Only took a day." 

"That's what a decent reward will getcha."

In the cart was a bound man, silently hunched up. Arthur could smell blood.

The cart halted outside the south tower, about ten feet away from its twin. One of the guards poked the prisoner unkindly with his lance.

"Up you get, loverboy. Time to take your punishment. Bet you wish you picked the other side now."

A swift kick to the stomach doubled him up. It took all six of them to drag the prisoner up the stairs to the top of the south tower. Arthur's attention clung to him as he struggled, broad shouldered and determined, against every inch of the climb. When he disappeared from sight, Arthur had to swallow hard to wet his dry mouth. His pulse was racing as if in the throes of a fight himself. He felt imperiled, under attack from a force he couldn't see. The unfamiliar clothes itched on his skin. He felt like a bird clenched in a huge, invisible hand. 

They didn't bother to chain this one up. The trapdoor thudded shut behind them, sealing the prisoner on the turret. A few moments later, the new prisoner had shucked off his ropes and was pacing the narrow space like a man possessed. The moonlight caught the breadth of his bare chest. 

"No—" The young man's torment took on an even more wretched tone from the top of the other tower. "Don't do it. Keep yourself under control. I won't tempt you. I'll bite off my tongue if I have to."

The only answer he got was an unhappy- "Quiet!" 

Down below, the soldiers were swapping wagers like the start of a dog fight. 

"Two copper bits says he's finished before morning. The lad in full heat, and our rebel general an alpha to the quick."

The carnal undertone was crystal clear, even if the terminology was strange. It must be the disorientation of populating someone else's dream. There was a sweat all over him - an awful, clammy, alive feeling, and god help him, he should be exploring, he should find this White Castle, but he couldn't make himself move away. He shifted closer to where the guards loitered around the empty cart. Something was driving him crazy, an itch in his veins, a discordant note that he couldn't distinguish from the background noise. He needed to find it. He was hungry, desperately hungry.

"Only a matter of time before the heat gets the better of him."

"He'll jump all right. As soon as the little princeling really starts to beg. But not even the heat haze could get him over that gap. We'll be picking his flesh off the rocks come tomorrow."

"No more than he deserves. Traitors the both of them."

The tallest of the guard's sniffed the air as if in the company of a good roast dinner. "Good thing it's Her's got the only key to the other tower," he said. "The boy smells so good up there, I'd forget my orders in the blink of an eye if I could get my hands on him."

His colleague took a sniff of his own. "Yeah, I'd take that. I'd – Hang on. There's another—"

They turned, all six of them, to where Arthur stood in the shadows. 

"Who've we got here then?" said the tall one in the growl of a crouching predator. 

Too late, much too late, Arthur understood. His hand flew to the pendant at his throat. A glass circle. The letter "O". He turned and ran.

In slippery shoes, he skidded through alleyways and narrow streets, the calls of the pursuit hot in his ears. Unused to navigating blind in a dreamscape, he let his instincts guide him, fending himself off walls, vaulting over a wooden gate. 

It took one wrong turn to bring him up against a blank wall. Cornered. He paused, panting, his heart hammering madly in his chest. The six of them slowed and spread out, advancing at leisure now that their quarry was caught. There was a broken brick at his feet. He could take out one of them, maybe two. And then- And then. 

"That's it, my lovely."

The tall one approached first. Arthur could smell the exertion on him, and the prisoner's blood. There was a roast meat scent on his breath. He clutched the brick at hip height, and thought bizarrely, _I don't have to fight this_. The soldier was on him, a hand at his throat, turning him around to face the wall. The brick fell into the dust. And just like that, the discord and irritation vanished, replaced by a profound sense of peace. 

"That's it, my lovely," the soldier was repeating in his ear. "Nice and quiet. Let's give you what you need."

His hand was under Arthur's tunic, grasping the tie of his breeches.

**

"Arthur."

He shrank away from the light that burst in on him. At the jerk of his arm, the needle pulled free.

"Your cardio was out of control," Eames was saying, his face rigid with concern, framed by bookshelves, the forgery abandoned. "I had to kick you out. Did you get anything?"

Beside them, Sara St Clair's left hand was making the very first twitches of consciousness. 

He nodded. 

"Thank Christ." Eames loomed above him, hand outstretched. "Come on."

From Arthur's position on the floor, Eames looked for a moment like a stranger. A dangerous stranger with the sort of muscles that could kill with a single blow. In the black pants and close fitting black top he'd worn topside, he looked like a professional killer. With a flex of biceps and shoulders he pulled Arthur to his feet. It flared up, the heat in his belly that had never really settled from the dream level. 

The mark opened her eyes. An instant later, the roof caved in.

**

 _Anomolous brain chemistry,_ is how Arthur described the situation in the executive summary of the report he started to type out as soon as they arrived back at base. 

He normally relished this aspect of going in as both extractor and point man. This was where the greatest precision was called for. This was where he would capture the dream perfectly in words, without the aid of video, photographs or measurements. Translating transitory thoughts into a solid, permanent record. 

Only, precision was slipping through his grasp this time. Instead of facts, what dominated his memory was sensations. Goddamn subjective, unscientific, irrelevant sensations. Head of Marketing in a billion dollar publishing company had not offered him an editor's annual salary to find out how it felt to walk around in the plot for Sara St Clair's next erotic blockbuster. She wanted a plot outline that would allow her staff writers to write a competing derivative work.

Holed up in his room, he replayed the extraction moment by moment, and ruthlessly censored every word that was not strictly grounded in fact. Dimensions. Materials. Words that had been spoken, he reproduced verbatim. He threw off his jacket and opened the window so that the damp, icy air would keep him on edge. The immediacy of physical discomfort was almost enough to keep at bay the vivid sensation of the second level.

When he read back his notes, they related in a satisfactorily clinical manner the half of the dream that he wished the client to know about. _The principal character, Prince Alexei, is an "omega", which indicates a permanent biological state where the subject undergoes periods of "heat", during which they experience heightened sexual receptiveness, sometimes with multiple partners, often acting under powerful physical compulsion. The character has a strong sexual attachment ("bond") with a dominant "alpha" who is a leader in a rebellion against the kingdom's ruler. This sexual dynamic would appear to be the primary driver of the plot._

He was almost done when there was a soft knock on the door and Eames came in to leave a tumbler of bourbon on the desk at Arthur's elbow.

"Lin and I are turning in. We'll debrief in the morning."

"Sure," Arthur replied distractedly, scrolling towards the more prosaic start of the document.

As expected, Eames didn't try to resist the temptation to have a glance.

 _"Anomolous,"_ he read out wryly. "That's putting it lightly."

"Goodnight, Eames."

When he was gone, Arthur returned to the business end of the document, the two lovers on the towers, compelled by a biological urge so strong it could make them leap to an almost certain death, just for the hopeless chance of coming together. The way it read on paper seemed absurd. It was only when he closed his eyes and remembered how his body had responded to the crackle in the air all around them that it came alive in his mind. The response had been instinctive, far beyond his control, like the adrenalin flood that came when a gun fired unexpectedly. Even now, two levels removed, he could hear the pulse in his own ears. 

There was a lingering scent behind him. A non-descript trace of human skin, like a freshly vacated locker-room after a game. It wasn't like Eames to neglect his hygiene. He usually kept himself clean to military standards on a job, well used to the niceties of working in close quarters with strangers. When he took his first sip, Eames's fingerprints on the glass seemed to give off a salty, complicated smell that mingled with the sweet, knock-out promise of the bourbon. 

He scrolled back to the executive summary and added the word "highly".

**

As sudden as a kick, Eames woke in the dead of night, all his senses tuned to a threat.

He was alone in the dark room. Branches whipped around in the wind outside. He held his breath and listened.

There it was. A sound of distress from somewhere close by. Arthur's room. Immediately, his mind plotted out routes and danger points. Hallway - obvious and dangerous. Window to window - left him blind if the curtains were drawn. Window to back door - opportunity to clear the exit route of any look-outs. He slipped his gun from under the bed and felt around carefully in the dark for his shoes. 

The groan came again. Eames paused with his shoe half-on. Something was off. The sound was tormented, but ... it took a moment to place it. Panic. There was none of the fear that a man with a gut wound or a knife point to his eye would be feeling. Even Arthur couldn't be completely fearless under torture - could he? He eased his window open nonetheless.

The third time, knowing what to listen for, he got it. Heat rose from his own throat in sympathetic embarrassment as he pulled himself back into his room. He'd worked jobs with all sorts before - the midnight confessors, the sleepwalkers - he'd seen all the manifestations of a chemical-impaired mind trying to fight its way back to a healthy dream state. Arthur had always been one of the quietest ones, who gave away even less in sleep than he would when awake. These heartfelt erotic noises were impossible to reconcile with the Arthur he knew, who, once the clock was ticking, had to be distracted or tricked into parting with so much as a smile. 

Faintly, he heard Lin knock on Arthur's door and call his name, facing up to a compromising situation with her usual sangfroid. Through the wall, he could make out Arthur's alarm on waking, then his curt dismissal. After that, the night was quiet. 

**


	2. Chapter 2

Just one of the many stand-offish habits that made Arthur such a delight to work with was the way he took meals in the kitchen, standing up. The absence of chairs saved him the bother of having to fend off any unwanted offers of company or conversation. He even ate with a battlefield efficiency that seemed to separate him from the sloth and self-indulgence of lesser team members who took breakfast in a leisurely slouch with their feet up on the coffee table.

With the mild voyeuristic curiosity stirred up by the past night still piquing his interest, Eames found himself less willing than usual to indulge Arthur's demarcation of personal boundaries. He ran the hot tap at a trickle and filled the sink higher than necessary for his bowl and a few of yesterday's tea cups. He shrugged off his shirt to keep the sleeves dry and tied it around his waist, over the battered singlet. Arthur took a half-step away from him and continued his brisk bites of toast. 

"What time did you finish your report?" he asked as he dropped a couple of sudsy spoons onto the drying rack.

"I don't know," Arthur said irritably after a couple of moments. "Late." 

He dumped his plate on the counter with a messy crust abandoned on it. Something about him was fractionally off, like a second-rate forgery. His merciless focus seemed, unbelievably, distracted, and he'd gone overboard with the wax in his hair. 

"Are you finished with that?" When Eames reached across him to take the plate, the jerk of muscle across Arthur's abdomen was obvious through his t-shirt. Eames had a fleeting impression of heat on his skin before Arthur stepped back. 

"What does it look like?" he snapped without turning as he left the room. There was more colour in his face than usual - just a hint of pink about the cheeks. He was succumbing to a fever, perhaps. That could have unsettled his sleep enough to explain last night's uncharacteristic display.

** 

It was not lost on Eames that, when Arthur finally deigned to join them in the work room for the debrief, he picked the furthest corner of the table and opened his laptop like the wall of a fortress. He exchanged a pointed glance with Lin.

"There was more than just sedatives at work down there," Arthur said without preamble. "She's used a PASIV before."

Eames had already let out his opinion in a laugh when Lin replied, "That would certainly fit the blood chemistry readings. It must be frequent use to produce that level of resistance. To move about in the dream like you described, she would have to have resistance to the sedative in her system as well."

Eames protested, "You're not going to tell me she was moving about in that first level. I had to drag myself up those stairs by the bannister, and I do know a little about manipulating dream physics."

Unsmiling, Arthur continued. "Strong resistance to both the sedative and the somnacin mix. What does that tell you, Eames?"

"She never leaves the house. Where would a recluse like that lay hands on a PASIV?"

Lin looked up from her graphs to say, "Her publishing house would buy her a fully operational space station if it helped her keep writing best-sellers."

In Arthur's glare was a challenge. Arthur was not, Eames had to concede, the sort of person to look for excuses to cover up his own mistakes. He'd never tried to hide his modest errors on the Fischer job behind all the bigger betrayals that had nearly brought them down. He would not put forward such an unlikely theory without having faith in it. 

"If you're right, how do we get past it when we go in again?"

The way Arthur scowled at his screen made Eames worry that the answer was something he'd find awfully unpalatable, but in the end, Arthur gathered himself and said,

"We use higher doses and keep it short. All we need is the publication date. She won't be so suspicious if the scene is her house this time. We wait for her to go under on her own machine, then we kick her out of her dream and into ours."

"Two lines running into her at once?" Lin said, clearly calculating dosages in her head.

Eames asked doubtfully, "You've tested this sort of move before, have you?"

"There's no time for that," Arthur said with a grim resolve that sounded more like his usual self. "I'll use the backdoor link to her security feed to start work on the build. You need to find some footage of her editor and get ready to put a forge together. You've got until tomorrow night."

When he had folded up his computer and disappeared into his bedroom, Eames sat chewing his pen and smiling to himself. It almost made the indignity of the job bearable, the chance to watch predictable, play-it-safe Arthur forced to chuck his usual perfectionism out the window and gamble on a half-baked plan that flouted at least one sacrosanct trade rule, trusting the mediocre science of instinct like any other mortal. The job was going quietly off the rails, and he was almost having fun.

**

Arthur sat frozen, with his finger resting on the release switch and the needle starting to throb in his arm. Had Cobb hesitated like this, in the last days of his career? Had the horror of what he might see in the dreamscape taken possession of his limbs and turned this familiar action into a test of will?

In four years of dreaming, no matter what he'd met in dreams, Arthur had always relished this moment. It was like the drawing of a gun. The turn of the ignition in a high performance car. The potential of it swept him up and brought him to life. 

Today, for the first time, the boundaries of what he could and could not control had disintegrated. 

Last night, a nameless, formless worry had kept him awake for hours poring over his notes; then, when exhaustion finally claimed him, he had fallen straight into a dream like a deep, dark pit. He was drowning in pure sensation. Hands on his bare skin. Rough hands. Dozens of hands. Heat everywhere, an electric charge in his veins that hissed for release. Fingers roved over him, seeking entrance, while he stretched himself out helplessly in this clutching sea and begged for more. His lungs filled with the animal smell of men - salt and acid sweat and the sour tang of sex. And even when his body was breached in every way he could be, still it wasn't enough. Still he needed more.

After Lin had woken him, he'd spent the night pacing until his bare feet went numb. 

The mark's dream had followed him up. It sat like a guilty thought in the back of his head, ready to sweep back over him the moment he lowered his guard. Daylight couldn't dispel it. Twenty minutes under the shower only made it worse, as the droplets on his back became fingertips, and the water sliding over his nipples turned into tongues. Brutally cold water and the routine of brewing coffee restored him a bit, but he had barely taken the first bite of his toast when it surged back again. The rough bread against his tongue made him think of skin. Coarse hair over powerful muscle. The feel of it under his mouth ... the taste— 

Bitterly, Arthur stabbed the release button with his finger. Anything had to be better than this.

When he came out of the dream, he tore the line free, staggered across the room and threw open the window. The cold air struck his sweaty face and neck like a lash. 

**

The narrow road that led past their base climbed up to lose itself in the mountains. Not much traffic troubled it, only the occasional logging truck or the reclusive inhabitants of cabins even more remote than theirs. The bitumen smacked satisfyingly hard under Arthur's feet, pace by pace, as he ran. Up higher, the air dropped a few more degrees, so that he had to tuck his hands into the loose ends of his sleeves. The steep corners made his thighs and calves strain. The neck of his shirt was wet. He hit that comfortable rhythm that he felt he could carry on forever.

This, like any problem, he would conquer by trial and error and persistence. Anything that was not real could be beaten. Arthur was in control of the situation. Nothing else was acceptable. He stepped up the pace.

After a few more miles, his lungs started to burn. A little further, each breath was a battle, and his mind was empty of every thought except the next step, the next gulp of air. He tripped on a pothole and grazed his palms, and clung to the road surface with the smell of victory sweet in his throat. 

Finally, he turned around for the return journey.

"Cold out?" Eames enquired with a penetrating expression when he trudged past the work room. He was slouched on the sofa, back against the arm-rest, with a laptop balanced on his bent up knees. His feet were bare. Long feet, worn-in, thick around the heel. Agile looking toes. Faint wisps of pale brown hair.

Arthur blinked and turned away. "Not cold enough."

**

Eames retied his scarf and tucked his hands back under his arms. Well after midnight and Arthur was still glued to his notebook. There hadn't been a word of conversation in at least half-hour. The wind had dropped away, leaving the mist like a stifling blanket over the landscape. The wet air sucked up all the sounds. Arthur's felt tip didn't even tap as it struck the page. 

He couldn't be writing anything more than "1.15am - No change". The light in the study indicated that the mark was still at work. Eames trained the night vision glasses on the window and saw the tiny colour-graded figure sitting at her desk. The occasional movement confirmed that she was still fully conscious. They were watching for the moment when that changed. 

As he lowered the glasses, he caught the twitch of Arthur's attention fastening on him and jerking away again. He was familiar enough with Arthur's genuine indifference to recognise that this was not the real thing. He was making a determined effort to exile Eames from his field of vision completely.

"She's still moving about," he reported. "Lifting a glass. Turning her head. Can't have gone under yet."

Arthur gave a vague murmur and bent over his notebook. 

Eames leaned in. "I'd say we could be here a while yet."

"You don't need to be here at all," Arthur snapped, shifting away. 

Arthur had been on his way out the door, torch in hand, when Lin had pulled her boots on and announced she'd be joining him. From the unbendable look on her face, Eames understood that she had picked it up too. The haste and withdrawal in Arthur, like a man concealing an injury, or a lie. Either way, he should not be spending the night alone in the cold, perched thirty metres in the air on slippery metal. But, for all her formidable competence, Lin was five foot three and could never lift him if he lost consciousness, or hold him back if he got it in his head to do something stupid. 

So he had waited for Arthur to agree to Lin's company - her matter-of-fact delivery made her one of the few people able to give him criticism without getting her head bitten off - and quietly swapped places with her. Arthur hadn't even tried to hide his displeasure.

Shifting onto all fours, Eames crawled over to look over his shoulder. Close enough to smell the waxy product in his hair, without stirring a reaction. Beside sparsely kept records of the mark's movements, Arthur was drawing. A shadowy landscape. Two towers. A perfect full moon, brighter than the one that lit his work. And a hand, a man's hand, broad across the back and rendered in detail.

He said, close to Arthur's ear, "Would it kill you to indulge in a little conversation if you're bored?"

And Arthur shuddered. Arthur, who could keep his cool with twelve storeys of office tower disintegrating underneath them. The movement jolted the notebook off his lap, and he lunged for it as it slid towards the edge. He was actually leaning right over into the void when Eames grabbed him by the back of his jacket and then by the wrist. 

As they balanced precariously and drew back from the edge, his senses pricked up yet again. His specialist skill set in the dream world was cultivating and manipulating sexual attraction, and he was alert to every one of the signs. Elevated body temperature and heart-rate. Agitation. Impulsiveness. 

"Get back in position," Arthur said through gritted teeth, with a look like Eames had just slid a knife in his gut.

And then he said, "Motherfucker-". Because the light in the study had finally gone out.

The moment the mark had finished her twenty minutes on the PASIV and fallen into the first shuffle and squirm of normal sleep, Arthur was shoving his notebook into his pack and making for the ladder.

Eames only just beat him to it, and kept them to a slow, careful pace. Each rung of the descent made him less happy. On every job they'd worked, Arthur had been the one team member he never had to worry about. In fact, when things fell apart, Arthur's competence was something the team leaned on. When the job was up against the wall, Arthur threw away his officious rigidity in favour of brilliant improvisation, and he fought to the last breath to salvage even the most impossible win. 

His thighs and wrists ached by the time he reached the ground. The rungs were getting frosty, and he had the feeling of carrying the weight of two men instead of one. 

**

The moment the first misty wash of sunlight crept through his window, Arthur stood up from the wooden chair he'd spent the night in and pulled on his sweat pants. His shoulders and neck ached, stiff from the long night, as he bent down to shove his feet into his trainers. Scattered on the floorboards was a carpet of origami figures folded out of newspaper - dozens of them that he'd turned to for a distraction throughout the night's torment. For all the good it had done. 

The rain was falling lightly against the window as he stretched, slowly forcing his tense muscles to give way. Good. Its icy needles might just be enough to put out the fire under his skin.

To the dull rhythm of the road under his feet, he could finally analyse the memory from a safe distance. The dream that lurked at the edges of his conscious mind had coalesced into a particularly fixed form this last day. That was to be expected, maybe. When he listened to what his body wanted, it was men he turned to, every time, and there was only one man he knew of for miles around. It was an inconvenience to find himself fixated on a co-worker, and especially on someone with intermittent access to his dreams, but any distraction could be mastered by discipline. The twinge in his right calf was back. He welcomed it. 

By daylight, it was just a matter of will. But last night ... He'd let his eyes close once, just barely long enough to slip into a doze, and between one moment and the next he'd plunged straight into the middle of another dream. Clothes in shreds, hands and knees aching from the cold stone floor, he remembered nothing about the scene except the man bridged over him, the wood and bitter citrus smell of cologne he knew from the last few days, and the salt underneath it. One hand grasped the back of his neck as he begged. Jesus, the words he'd used - his chest burned now to remember it. In the dream, he'd been aroused already, teased to the point of desperation. All he needed was to be filled, and an instant later it was done. Time shattered then. It seemed like hours he was aware of nothing but the hot slide of penetration as Eames took him over and over, until his arms failed and he crumpled forward, until -

He woke, hard and delirious. It took him a matter of seconds to come, pants torn open, fist tugging roughly as he stripped himself raw. The intensity of it blinded him and the relief - the relief was like weightlessness, like pure anaesthetic in his veins. But by the time he'd gotten himself clean and drunk a glass of water, it was back again, the hunger, the distraction. 

His fingers had been shaking by the time he emptied the pill bottles out of his suitcase. A suite of narcotics, sedatives and amphetamines, all legitimately prescribed to treat a frightening range of conditions that Arthur has never suffered from. He emptied out a dose of Ambien, something to send him into a dreamless sleep. But drugs were a poor substitute for self-control, and he couldn't afford to add any trace chemicals into the mix on tomorrow's job, which was volatile enough with the chemical cocktail the mark brought with her. He had packed the bottles away then torn the front page off last week's newspaper and cut it into squares. 

Near the top of the hill, where his lungs burned and every step turned into torture, he let himself dwell on the question - why Eames? 

Sure, there had been slow nights on stalled jobs where he'd had nothing else to do but watch him, those solid shoulders hunched over a table while he put the delicate finishing touches on a security pass. And yeah, he'd thought about having the bulk of him under his hands, dipping his thumb into that insolent mouth. Eames liked men, he knew that. What he didn't like was Arthur.

The return journey and a cold shower left his head calm and clear. He swept the origami birds into a plastic bag and tied it, then he stepped into the work room. 

It was like opening the door onto a tropical summer. Too hot, air so thick it seemed to stick in his throat. The room smelled like a badly cleaned gym after a boxing tournament. Testosterone filled the air like fog. A needy shiver ran down his spine.

"Arthur?" Lin prompted.

He took his seat and went through the plan one last time. A few moments ago, every thread of it had been clear in his mind. The memory of it was enough for him to work off now, but his instructions sounded wooden to his own ears. Lines recited without conviction. Already, the infallible chain of evidence and conclusion was dissolving into blurry, sensory logic. 

He knew what he needed. He just had to struggle his way through the next 12 hours until the job was wrapped up. Then he was going to head for the sleaziest city bar he could find and live out every one of those sordid visions for as long as his body could take.

After that, there was an electronics export venture in Seoul he'd been meaning to look into.

**

It was early afternoon, and he and Lin were on their third game of mahjong on her little plastic tiles, when Arthur came back from yet another run. They listened to the distant sounds of the shower and let their glum silence go on. Later, there was a clatter in the closet at the back of the house, then the brisk rhythm of a saw. On the wall outside their room - the dilapidated back wall that got the worst of the built up winter snow - a hammer started to pound.

"Too much on his mind to be social," Eames said, half under his breath.

Lin said, "Your move."

But the unpredictable stop-start of saw and hammer made it impossible to concentrate on the game. In a few more minutes, she'd emptied her hand and wiped him out.

Teams fell apart when a key member started to elevate himself above the rest. Eames knew both pleasant and unpleasant ways to force someone back in their place. He wasn't about to let Arthur pull away from them halfway through the job.

The overhang of the eaves was barely more than a foot, providing meagre protection against the fine rain that slid down the back of Arthur's hoodie. Arthur's cheeks were pink with cold, but his hand where it gripped the hammer was blanched of all colour. There was a fresh bandaid on the lowest joint of his index finger, probably concealing a blister. It was intriguing to see him so unbuttoned. Arthur, who wore his crisp couture like Eames wore shabbiness, to make people trust him, and give him what he needed, and then forget him. 

He gestured with one of the tumblers. "Keep the blood warm."

Arthur took the last nail from between his teeth and held it in place. 

"Put it on the sill," he said disinterestedly.

Eames leaned on the wall beside the back step and sipped from his own glass. The mild sweat under Arthur's clothes made them cling as he wielded the hammer. He liked the opportunity to watch a body like Arthur's at work. To imagine what it might be like if he traded in his breadth for flexibility and the liberty of light weight. Arthur's skin slid revealingly over bone and sinew. He had all the leisure he could want, because Arthur did not appear inclined to acknowledge the existence of anything outside the task at hand.

Arthur slotted another board in place. "I've got it," he snapped, before Eames had done anything more than think of holding it up for him. He pressed it firmly with his hip and drove in the first nail with his back turned. Eames let the observations and memories come together in his mind. He knew what Arthur looked like under his clothes, but the picture of it was like an abandoned portrait, an unremarkable, dimly remembered outline with no detail to speak of.

"So this commission," he said, taking a moment to settle them both into the train of thought he’d come out here to set in motion. "The client's not exactly going to have more of these jobs on offer afterwards. Unless they're working their way down the best seller list."

Arthur struck two more swift blows, starting to get a bit damp along the brow.

"They're not."

He said it tightly, as if Eames had interrupted him in the middle of a tricky piece of open heart surgery, rather than a spot of impromptu handyman work that could hardly be calling for great depth of concentration.

"But you're putting a lot into it."

For the first time, Arthur spared him a sidelong glance that told him to get to the point. He took a long couple of sips to the sound of Arthur fishing around for more nails. The point was inexact. The point was that that maybe Arthur needed the space to do something about the way he'd drawn Eames into the job. It was somewhere to start, at least.

"Why?"

He hadn't even started with an offer. The evening after Jane's dengue fever diagnosis had been confirmed, the Mombasa police had broken down the door of Yusuf's workshop, and one of Eames's Spanish bank accounts had been abruptly shut down. A man in the sort of sunglasses that only CIA considered low profile had shown up at Eames's favourite casino. Then, a little before midnight, Arthur had called to offer a solution, at a price. 

Arthur slipped a tape measure out of his pocket, gauged the width of the next rotted board, and let it close with a snap. All his attention went into the straight line of the saw, holding the new board down with his knee on the second step.

"Arthur?"

"What?" came the objection, angrier than it had any right to be. The saw paused on the upstroke. He was breathing harder than the task called for. "Yes, I need a win on this one. The client's got political contacts through their bios. It's not as if I have a great track record this last year, and unlike some people I'm not just dabbling in extraction for kicks. Jesus."

Eames swirled the last mouthful of bourbon and waited. Arthur wiped his brow with his sleeve.

"Do you think I'd have done it this way if it wasn't important?" He fixed Eames with a hard look that faltered suddenly. His gaze slipped away. "I'll make it up to you. Some other job, I'll owe you." His voice was getting gravelly the more he talked. He adjusted his grip on the handle to get back to action. "Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"It'll do for now," Eames told him, and moved the untouched glass down on top of the plank he was working on. "We're square. Now drink up."

He stepped around Arthur and back into the house.

"I can't drink this." Arthur was looking up at him, a fine trail of sawdust on his cheek. The low angle put something fragile in his usually steady eyes. "Can I have a tea? Green. Please."

And buggered if that didn't work on him like a charm. When he squatted down to retrieve the glass, Arthur held himself very still, as if their proximity was a kind of threat, but he didn't draw away. 

How inconvenient, Eames thought as he waited for the kettle to boil. He'd been sure they'd killed the possibility of sexual attraction a long time ago, and all its complications.

**

Arthur wasn't going to make it. A matter of minutes to go, and his body was going to sabotage him after all. 

This malady was a stealthy kind of torture: too eager to be pain, located too low to be nausea. There was no ebb and flow, no angle or position that gave him a moment's mercy; just unrelenting emptiness, and the impossible knowledge of the cure he needed. It couldn't for an instant be shut out from his thoughts.

The car windows were steamed up. A witchy sort of moonlight cast a dim, slivery glow that took Arthur back to memories he couldn't seem to shut down. In the silence as they waited outside the mark's house, there was nothing to do but stare at the camera feed on his screen and breathe in the naked human smells that were magnified by the small space. The nutty fragrance of Lin's skin cream, and the mixed city smells that clung to her jacket. And Eames. The morning's cologne had worn off now, unmasking the scents of his body. The whole car smelled to Arthur like the most intimate parts of him - chest and under-arms and the private space between his thighs. 

Arthur’s clothes fitted tight like hands all over him. The fold of his sleeve pressed inside his elbow like lightly scratching fingers, and the reluctant beginnings of arousal were pulsing against the tight folds of cloth across his crotch.

Beside him, Eames twisted around to get something out of his back pocket. He moved his big shoulders efficiently in the small space. After a brief rustle, he slid a mint into his mouth and filled Arthur's susceptible mind with thoughts of his pillowy lips, wet flesh on the inside of them, the thick muscle of his tongue.

He gripped the steering wheel hard to stop his hand reaching out of its own accord. 

"Arthur?" Lin said with alarm.

"Just a minute." His voice sounded shaky to his own ears.

With a wrench, he was outside the car, stumbling into the promising, cold darkness beneath the trees. His shoes crunched loud through the undergrowth. The icy air bit his face and throat, but by god it felt good. His foot caught a branch and he fell down on all fours, fingers clenching in the leaf litter.

From in front of him came the black glitter of water. He dipped into the puddle and slathered the freezing water over the back of his neck. It trickled down his skin, dripped off his chin. His wet hand soothed the feverish heat in his cheeks.

He should pull the job. There was no way he should be adding somnacin to a system as shaky as this. But if he failed to deliver for an influential client who'd paid a 50% deposit on the strength of his promises, his reputation would be poisoned for good.

"What's going on?" Lin hissed from behind him. "I'm not going in there if you can't keep it together."

Arthur forced himself to remember the worst of his injuries. The broken pelvis from the failed kick in that suspension bridge level. That shot of Mal's that shattered his kneecap. 

"No," he said and pushed himself to his feet. "It's only a virus. I can hold it together long enough to get what we need."

The wind was whipping up as he slid back into the driver's seat, ignoring Eames's curious glance. The thick cloud finally rolled over the moon. All it left was the safe, artificial light of his screen. He only had to watch it for a few more minutes, thinking fiercely of gut wounds, before the mark went to bed. 

**

Arthur looked like he did at the business end of any extraction. Maybe a bit damp across the brow. His unconscious face showed none of the strain of the dream level. The mark, beside him on the bed, slept serenely. It appeared that Eames had successfully dropped her from her own dream level into Arthur's.

Time to get to work then. Eames positioned himself on the floor beside the bed and picked up the needle.

"He'll make it work," he said to Lin's mistrustful look. "There's no-one else like him when the job's on the brink." 

The twitch of her chin said it was his sanity about to be put on the line, not hers.

He woke up in the same room, by daylight. Lin was absent and Arthur was wearing a track in the carpet. The tight compression of his lips was hardly justified by the handful of minutes he must have been waiting down here.

"This way." He'd cleared the bathroom cabinet already, and brought in a stool so that Eames could get into character. There was a little flutter as he sat down, the pleasant prickle of having an audience. Eyes closed, he felt the lightness as his body changed and his weight and bones redistributed themselves. When he opened them, the frosted blonde hair and red lips of the mark's executive editor looked back at him. 

"Our readers demand originality," he said, testing. They were only using her voice, but the physical dimension was essential to playing the part perfectly. "The moment we stop evolving, we're finished."

After a beat, Arthur gave a single nod. "Let's go."

Despite the anachronistic tendencies of his costuming in dream levels, Arthur had a genuine fascination for technology. That made him one of the few dreamers who could confidently build levels that used complex electronics. Carpets and steel doors were one thing, but a functioning mobile phone network was a challenge to recreate unless you had at least an inkling of how it actually worked.

The mark answered Eames's call on the third ring, from her study on the other side of the house, and he led their conversation where it needed to go.

When he wandered back towards the bedroom, still talking, Arthur was examining one of the books in the shelf next to the bed. Evidently not a feature he'd designed himself. It wouldn't be the first time a mark had populated the dream with something other than projections.

He turned his questions to specifics. Could the new book be finished before Christmas if it needed to be? Would it be too edgy to be sold over the counter at Walmart - that was something they could work with.

Arthur turned and bent towards the catch of the mark's PASIV case, the repository of her most closely guarded secret. Eames stopped him with a raised finger. 

"No, of course you can't," Eames said, and let the pause stretch out. "Sara, if there's something wrong, it's important you tell me. There's nothing we can't fix."

The hesitation gave him confidence that he'd stirred up a guilty thought or two. 

"I have to get back to work, Helen," the mark said, pleasant but firm. "Thanks for the call."

The relief was transparent on Arthur's face when he opened the PASIV case and scanned the pages, nodding. He drew his gun out.

"There's a few minutes left on the clock," Eames reminded him, earning himself one of Arthur's darker glares. "Why don't we--"

He'd been about to propose an idle piece of sticky-beaking, to see what other features the mark had brought into the dream. But then his attention caught on a misplaced line of light that ran right up the side of the bookshelf. 

When he gave it a push, the whole bookshelf swung back and it opened just like a door. 

"Don't go in there." The tone of Arthur's warning would have better fitted a full scale gun battle or a town in the grip of an earthquake rather than the idyllic village scene that Eames could see through the newly opened doorway. It had a rustic sort of charm - the simple sort of world where wood and iron were the most advanced building blocks of human endeavour. There was something inviting in the air. Perhaps it was just the touch of spring that smelled so sweet after the numb ice of winter. Whatever it was, he wanted to taste it. 

"Just a peek won't do any harm." But Arthur was standing obstinately in his way. "This is repressive even for you. Would it kill you to show a little adventurous spirit?"

"We're not getting paid to play around."

He grasped Arthur's arms, but before he could shift him, Arthur had jerked away. 

"All right," Arthur said without meeting his eyes. "Go ahead then."

He took one step forward. The peaceful haze of smoke above the village chimneys was deceptive. There was a charge in the air. Eames's palms itched to grasp something he couldn't put a name to. There was a square up ahead. Two towers.

The last thing he heard was the click of the safety on Arthur's Glock before he was neatly tossed back into reality.

He spared himself a moment's self-reproach, feeling like an idiot for stretching his trust in Arthur just that bit too far. Or, worse yet, for letting himself think that Arthur might give in so easily. 

"All on track," he reported as Lin frowned over Arthur's unconscious form. 

"Are you sure? Something's wrong. He was fine until a moment ago."

It was impossible to miss. While the mark slept soundly, Arthur's chest rose and fell as if in the grasp of a deadly struggle. There was a delicate twitch in his fingers that should have been impossible with his blood full of drugs.

"Let's kick him now," Eames decided. "Get ready to sedate her the moment she surfaces."

One unnecessarily violent turn deserved another. With a couple of pillows on the floor, he pulled Arthur off the bed and dropped him. His eyes flew open on impact, wide with panic, flicking about the dimly lit room as if blinded. Eames crouched down beside him. "Keep it together. We're good."

Arthur said nothing, but he gripped the sleeve of Eames's jacket and held on. There was a tremble where his knuckles brushed against Eames's wrist. It was impossible to separate how much embarrassment was for himself, and how much for Arthur, whose vocabulary did not contain the word _help._

"All right?" Eames asked quietly. 

Arthur took a deep breath and held it, and slowly let go. He turned his face away.

"Shit."

When he followed the line of Arthur's gaze, he could see the problem. On the hallway table was a tablet, screen dimmed down to nothing more than a faint glow. Its camera pointed at the bedroom door, and without a doubt she'd sent the feed somewhere they couldn't easily erase it.

Eames grabbed it anyway as they left. 

Outside, the snow had started to fall, heavily enough to cover their tracks. For the short term at least. 

**

Arthur glared at his neatly packed bag and swore.

The exit plan was terminally fucked. Because the exit plan depended on being able to drive their hire car down the single road that led out of the mountains - the same road that was about to come under the very close scrutiny of whoever received the feed from that tablet. The back-up plan, which involved a ten mile overland walk, was better not attempted in mounting snow unless it turned into a matter of life and death.

So he was going to have to rough his way through one more sleepless night at least, with a body he'd lost control over and his mind halfway stuck in a dream state that wouldn't let go of him. He didn't bother asking himself whether it was possible. He asked what the first step was to making it work.

The others were in the work room, too keyed up to sleep, sipping the last of the bourbon and rehashing the extraction.

"I'm making dinner," he announced and kept going towards the kitchen, putting two walls and plenty of clean air between them.

 _A level within a level,_ Eames had been telling Lin, with an air of playful curiosity that said he'd been shot out of it before he suffered any ill effects. But Arthur himself had been less fortunate. Barely had he shot Eames to safety when he realised his error. He'd taken one step too far. The bookshelf door slammed behind him and vanished. The gun in his hand turned into a crossbow, no bolt in it, useless.

From the diminished box of supplies, he came up with a jar of sauce and a pack of spaghetti. He wouldn't dwell on the next part, how his feet had moved practically of their own accord towards the square, the hunger hitting his bloodstream like he'd snorted it in. He focused on synchronising cooking times, to distract himself from remembering. The carnal looks of the merchants in the square, whose eyes slid down him like fingers. The way his silver torque slipped against his sweaty throat. The rough grasp of the guards' hands around him. 

He put water in a pot and set the heat up high. The bit he wanted to remember - the bit that mattered - was how he'd known, as the guards led him towards the castle above the town, exactly who it was he'd meet there. The _Her_ who sat at the centre of this world. Who was the last person he could afford to have question him in a dream state when his body and mind were vulnerable. 

He watched the salt sink into the water, mind drifting. Military men on either side of him. The one in front shooting him the same hungry glance over his shoulder. And the way his clothes teased and itched everywhere they touched his skin, building a heat that clamoured to be put out. By the time they reached the throne room, he'd be ready to do or say anything just to get hands on him, fingers pushing into him - christ, where the fuck was the kick? 

He'd been trembling with it by the time they climbed the first flight of stairs in the castle, lungs full of the smell of their exertion, of the frustrated arousal on more than one of them. The throne room was long and severely furnished. Sara St Clair sat at the opposite end of it. 

"Please—" That had been his own ragged voice, looking at where the staircase continued upwards into a turret. "Take me up there. Lock the door. I'll do anything - anything you want." A crazy gleam of triumph had lit up the foremost guard's face. Greedy like a carnivore about to feed. How high was the parapet that crowned the tower, Arthur wondered. High enough to hurl himself over? Could he make himself do it? Here was a strong pair of hands ready to strip him bare and give him what he needed.

"Everything all right?" Eames asked, jolting him back. 

He was leaning casually in the doorway, as if he felt compelled to spend more time with Arthur, right now when Arthur couldn't bear to be in the same room. Because clearly he was getting a gleeful kick out of seeing Arthur lose it like a spooked first-timer, or on the lookout for more opportunities for advantage. 

Tearing the packet, Arthur dumped the spaghetti into a pot that had boiled down quite a bit. 

He said sourly, "Let me guess, you've got some genius insight into carbonara that no-one else in the industry can offer."

Eames opened his mouth and closed it again, and stayed to watch the stems wilt into the pot. "Making dinner at two a.m. isn't in your usual scope of services," he replied finally, milder than he might have. "If there's anything I can do, sing out, won't you."

Arthur emptied the sauce with a vicious shake into a second pan and switched on the heat. A few moments later, he was alone. 

He'd been up on the tower when the kick finally came. A violent banging from the other side of the trapdoor beneath them. The guard's teeth on his neck, his own spine bending back as if to give everything up, everything he had. And finally, to the sound of his shirt tearing away, he'd felt the knot in him unwind. For the first time, his body felt complete again, his own. He surrendered himself to pleasure and anticipation, scrabbled at his belt to get himself naked, and closed his eyes. And opened them to the sight Eames bending over him, and the most unutterable feeling of absence he could remember. 

The pasta had a clingy, submissive drape as he forked it into bowls, and the texture of the creamy sauce he refused to think about as he forced it down. A belly full of carbs might send him into too deep a sleep for dreams. He could only hope.

"Not bad," Eames had ventured cautiously, with a penetrating look that Arthur ignored.

Lin snorted, "It could use a salad and a bottle of Chateau Lafite. It's the least we deserve."

Arthur dumped his unfinished bowl next to the mahjong set on the work table as he left. Self-discipline be damned, he was going to lose it completely if he didn't get some sleep, so he swallowed one of his Ambiens dry and crawled into bed. Unconsciousness crushed him like a wave.

**


	3. Chapter 3

Arthur was naked when he woke. Clothes flung off in the fever of dreams. Already gripped in a state of arousal that should have taken a long session of rough handling to work up. It wasn't like any kind of sickness, that alienated his mind from his uncooperative body. No, in this, his body and mind were united in the same bottomless craving. Arthur ground himself front-first into the mattress, but it was a mocking shadow of what he needed, worse than doing nothing. 

He rolled back over. There was nothing to distract him other than the soft, sensual slither of snowflakes on glass. As if the universe itself was conspiring to torment him with unsatisfied longing. He wasn’t going to make it through the night. 

He didn't even bother dressing. Merely staggered down the dark corridor and into the bathroom, where he groped for the cold faucet and fought to twist it on.

It didn't help. He was beyond help. As he slid down the wall, taking the prickling spray front on, he thought of the guard's hot mouth with its brutal promise of teeth. He drifted back to the dream he'd just woken from, the sound of Eames's low curses still teasing at his ear and his solid, wonderful, unescapable weight. He put his unsteady hands over his face. 

The door handle creaked.

** 

Eames had borne witness to one or two psychotic breaks in his dreamshare career. They were a known industry hazard. So he was prepared for some fairly extreme hallucinations, paranoid aggression, a haggard figure palming a totem over and over and over.

It turned out he was not remotely prepared for the sight of Arthur crumpled under a cold shower, looking skinny and wan, too distressed even to cover himself up when the light came on. 

"Okay," Eames said after a very long silence, the word catching in his throat like a cough. "Okay, let's sort you out."

The look Arthur turned on him when he shut off the water had more entreaty in it than he cared to see. It shouldn't have stirred him the way it did.

"Do you need help to get up?" He slung the towel he'd picked up over his shoulder to free his hands. "Here."

Arthur's fingers were freezing, but they warmed up rapidly as Eames toweled them off. He dried Arthur's shoulders a little and draped the towel around them.

"Did you take something?" 

"Eames," Arthur wrenched out, and touched his mouth.

As gently as he could, Eames deflected the contact. "What did you take?"

Arthur just looked helplessly up at the ceiling and shook his head, a gesture of defeat that Eames found hard to watch. The towel slipped free. Eames picked it up again, averting his gaze. When he stood, Arthur had slipped into his space. "Touch me," Arthur murmured, his lips pressed flat with unhappiness. "I need your hands on me."

He drew Eames's free hand down, against his lower back, and let his eyes drift closed. His wet eyelashes made a dramatic contrast to his skin, unconsciously beguiling, and Eames's instincts responded to that like they'd been waiting for an opportunity to be beguiled.

He twisted free and, in a sort of compromise, encircled Arthur's wrist, aiming for clinical detachment.

"We've got an expert chemist in the next room. Come on, what's in your system?"

"Nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing, sweetheart." He winced at how the endearment slipped out, sounding flirtatious in his low voice. "You don't usually rub up against me like this."

But by then, Arthur had bent down to nose against the side of his throat. He felt the heat of Arthur's sigh against his neck. Since the distress in him seemed to be calming at last, Eames let him do it. He stared at the peeling edge of the wallpaper and returned his hand to the small of Arthur's back, in what he hoped communicated reassurance. 

"You smell amazing. I've never smelled anything as good as you."

This sultry, half-drunk voice didn't belong on Arthur, who handed out criticisms as routinely as business cards and made the faintest praise sound grudging. He felt an unmistakable heated nudge against his hip. And his own body responded automatically. 

It had been years since they'd touched each other. And even that had been just one night: a couple of fairly unsatisfying hand jobs, two new co-workers trying to assuage their curiosity without giving anything away. Both of them gambling with paltry stakes in the hope of winning more than they lost. Neither of their hearts had really been in it, producing a negative chemistry that Eames had never been tempted to repeat. But now -- Arthur was more than an arrogant kid on a quest to prove everything at once. There were things he'd come to respect about Arthur. His well-hidden relish for a crisis. His surprising sense of chivalry in a knavish profession, and his ability to dispense with chivalry completely the moment the job demanded it. Not generally qualities he would have considered sexual, until now. 

Arthur swayed against him and didn't sway back. 

"It's all right," he heard himself say quickly. "It's all right. Something's got you muddled up. We'll set you right. Let's get you back to bed." 

"No!" The body in his arms went tense with panic all over again. "I'm not going back. It kills me. I wake up so hungry, hungry like you can't imagine. Eames—"

"All right." 

He shifted his hand soothingly over Arthur's back and Arthur leaned into it.

"Eames, I need your help. Don't make me beg. You can— You've got all the cards here. Every one. I know." He kissed Eames's mouth, soft as a snowflake, eyes closing. "Please."

That was enough to get Eames moving - that, and the incriminating heat growing in his groin - back towards his own room. He was not sure that he felt entirely in his right mind, himself. Because he wasn't made of stone. He had a healthy libido, even if he'd seen too much collateral damage to let it go beyond the occasional curious one-nighter at work. And despite their uninspiring history, Eames related to the world aesthetically, and yes of course he'd watched Arthur vault over a bannister, or flex his bony, supple wrists to coax a jammed catch to release, and translated the view idly into the bedroom. Skinny, feisty Arthur with his permanent pout and his perpetually clean hands and his hair always fixed for business. But his fantasies were the safe kind, far-fetched with no relationship whatever to their forgettably brief reality. 

His mouth felt tender where Arthur had kissed him. He'd never expected to find Arthur pliant. He'd never dreamed it could put this awful burn in his lungs. 

He sat Arthur on the side of his bed and felt around in his medikit for the sheet of Stilnoct he travelled with. He balanced one on his palm and picked up the water glass from the table. 

"Go on. Get some sleep. We'll ask Lin—"

"Do you fucking think I haven't tried that?" Arthur knocked the tablet away, anger flashing in his eyes. "I've already taken two. If I could fix it with a pill, I wouldn't have come to you."

That stung a bit. Eames took a long draught of the water and put it down.

"Get into bed then - don't worry, I'm not going anywhere."

Suspiciously, Arthur let himself be guided into a lying position but, once there, he refused to let the covers be drawn up until Eames was in there with him. That was bound to end in disaster. When Eames had left the bedroom to investigate, he'd pulled on a shirt, only one button done up, and no trousers. There was no rational explanation for that, except that the thought of being half-naked in front of Arthur must have appealed to his sleepy mind. 

He put his hand on Arthur's breastbone, weighing down every breath. Arthur seemed to be breathing slower now. He let one finger stroke up and down the line of his sternum and struggled to remember where it was most soothing to be touched, those magic places the best of his nannies had known that had melted him like butter. Arthur rolled onto his side, curled towards him, not pressing for anything more than where their knees rested together. Eames's strokes drew higher, tracing Arthur's collarbone and then his bicep, because it seemed sensible to keep doing the one thing that calmed him down. 

Tomorrow, he'd get Lin to check the sleeping pills Arthur had taken, make sure they hadn't been adulterated. If it was just the pills, he'd have slept it off by then anyway, situation fixed. But when he thought back over the last few days of odd behaviour, a series of random symptoms seemed to connect themselves in a pretty obvious line. A line that went back to the first extraction that had gone so weirdly wrong.

"Ah!" Arthur's heartfelt groan made him snatch his hand away from where he'd slipped and grazed over his nipple. 

"You're killing me," Arthur said in the same wretched tone. "Can I blow you? At least let me taste you."

And with that he was wriggling down the bed to mouth at Eames's briefs. His lips and tongue were fantastically hot even through cotton as he planted eager kisses and moulded his open mouth over the very responsive shape of Eames's dick. 

"Arthur-" It wasn't as stern as it should be, but far from encouraging. Still, he had to work his hand under Arthur's jaw and lift him off. "You don't know - Arthur!"

"Jesus - I'm sorry about last time, all right! I wasn't about to let you and your bulldozer ego get an advantage when you'd only been in the business for five fucking seconds. So I wasn't everything you wanted. Big deal. You can't hold a grudge about one lousy fuck forever."

He was kind of floored by the impassioned delivery, and the wounded gleam Arthur's dark eyes took on in the lamplight. He weighed up the words he needed to explain that, although his dick found Arthur's petition for a do-over unequivocally convincing, he retained some fairly serious doubts about the timing.

There was an irritated knock on the door. "Is everything all right in there?" 

Arthur looked shocked, as if slapped, but he wrestled his voice under control and said, "Fine, Lin. Just a professional disagreement. We'll keep it down."

Eames watched the frantic pulse in Arthur's throat, emphatically outlined by shadow, that belied his steady tone. He added, "Sorry about the racket, love - shut the hall door, why don't you?"

After a hesitation pregnant with disbelief, her footsteps receded.

Arthur palmed his face with a sigh. He seemed to have come back to himself a bit, looking up at Eames from his highly compromising position with the same dogged expression he wore when team meetings buckled over a difference of opinion. 

"Look, I'm not asking you to give anything back. You can have anything you want, here. I'm not - if you can do this for me, you'll call all the shots." 

"Right now, you're a picture of sincerity. And you'll just as likely kill me tomorrow, when you come to your senses. You understand this is just a psychological anomaly, don't you? At some level, you know you're not in your right mind." 

Arthur bent down and kissed him again, through the heated cotton, as if to point out that there was a physical reality at work here, no matter what might be troubling his mind. 

"I can't - Eames, I could barely manage to operate a simple faucet, back there. My head's full of fog — I need to— I'm going to fix this. But first, I need you to put out this fire in me." 

He was laying out facts and conclusions like in any strategy session. Except that now he hesitated, giving Eames the chance to come around, where he usually tried to barge bad-temperedly through any dissenting point of view. 

He traced lightly from the inside of Eames's hip to his navel, thoughtful. "I'm not asking you to cut off one of my fingers. Tomorrow it will be like nothing happened. I'm sorry it had to be you, okay."

Arthur's willingness and naked proximity were doing their surreptitious work on Eames's system. Beneath the negligible pressure of his pants, his dick filled out a little more with each breath. When Arthur slid his hand under the elastic and pulled it back, the last hesitation went with it.

"Go on then," he said, right before the first hot touch of Arthur's lips.

When Arthur pressed a kiss part way up the stiffening length of his dick, it jerked right up to acquiesce. It must have been the build-up caused by surprise and resistance. He’d had full deep-throat fellatio that felt less erotic than that kiss. Arthur nosed up the line of his shaft, as it gained heat and definition under his encouragement, then slowly opened up to lick with the flat of his tongue. He steadied himself on hands and knees and kept on going, trailing the point of his tongue up to the tip and lapping over the shrinking overhang of foreskin. He was taking his time now, as if Eames’s permission had bled the urgency out of him. The rasp in his breath sounded more like hunger, not desperation. There was practically a groan in it.

When he slipped his mouth over the head, Eames’s lost his focus for a long moment. Arthur was going about this like any professional task: like he meant to get results, and show the best in the business how it should be done.

“Hang on.” 

Arthur’s eyes were a bit glazed as he pulled off, letting Eames’s dick rest heavily back on his belly. There was a glossy smudge on his bottom lip that was impossible to look away from. Eames thumbed at it dizzily while he tried to get his thoughts under control. 

Perhaps Arthur preferred it this way – an impersonal blow job, down there on his hands and knees where he didn’t even have to look Eames in the face. He could be determined not to ask Eames to do anything more than lie there. But there was the way he’d tried to mould himself into Eames’s hands before. And how he’d said “touch me”, like a man begging for a mercy shot, pinned under the wreckage of a failed architectural experiment. 

Eames had not made generosity a habit. Extraction was a competitive industry on the far fringes of legality, where the frontiers shifted far too quickly for any real moral norms to crystalise. He did his job, and split before the moment he had his fee in hand. So it was bizarre, the compulsion he felt to do right by Arthur in this. It was reckless, out of all proportion … and the more foolhardy it seemed, the more determined he was to do it.

There was no mistaking how much Arthur liked it when Eames slid his thumb into his mouth. He let it stroke down the length of his tongue, onto the bony floor, hooking behind his teeth.

“Yes?” 

Arthur closed his eyes, then gave a jerk of a nod. His look was tremulous, like a gut shot man clinging to consciousness, fighting hopelessly not to slip into a darker place. 

“Come up here.”

It was a good thing he’d been allocated the only double bed in the cabin. Arthur crawled up beside him and lay on his side. He squirmed a little when Eames peeled the sheet down to his knees, to take a good look. The half-finished, boyish build he distantly remembered had thickened out around the chest, and his shoulders looked like he’d thrown a few serious punches over the years. Unarmed, Eames could easily pin him if he didn’t mind some nasty bruising from well-aimed knees and elbows. But what he was greedy for was nothing so simple or brutish. 

“What do you want?” 

Arthur flashed him the same dark glare he got when he pointed out an irrelevant discrepancy merely to derail a briefing that had gone on too long for his tastes. “Don’t you know what you’re doing?”

Eames grinned. “I’d prefer not to rely on guesswork.”

From the way Arthur glanced away, it was as if he’d been asked to disclose a major trade secret, and doubted his powers of resistance. Eames had wondered, now and then, how Arthur’s dogged self-control would hold up under torture. The answer he usually came to was fairly capably.

The shape of Arthur’s collarbone looked naked under his skin. He traced the inside of it, moved up to the hollow of his throat and left his fingers there to feel the answering rise in pulse. He rolled easily onto his back when Eames grasped his upper arm and pushed, and that – the surrender and the greedy indrawn breath that went with it – tipped him over.

With a firm grip pinning Arthur’s elbows to the mattress, he bent down to graze a teasingly inadequate kiss over a nipple, and pulled back to watch the flesh tighten and swell. 

“Eames-” Arthur ground out, in an unsteady voice that revealed everything his closed eyes tried to conceal. “Please.”

There was no line or curve of Arthur’s body that didn’t appear erotically vulnerable just now. Eames kissed his Adam’s apple, swiped his tongue into the hollow beneath it until he had Arthur arching up into the touch. The tendons in the side of his neck strained under Eames’s teeth. He grew rougher as he moved down to the other nipple, opening his mouth wide to scrape and bite and tug, and that got Arthur writhing beneath him, reduced to a jumble of panting and stifled groans, and the occasional jewel of a please. 

“Tell me what you want,” Eames repeated, between kisses along the lovely line of his collarbone, well aware that his own self-control was hanging by a thread. 

The next groan came out through clenched teeth. Arthur’s face was a blind grimace, defending his privacy to the last breath in his body. 

The unsatisfied swell of Eames's cock was verging on uncomfortable. Blood pounded in his temples. While he had a single scrap of self-control left, he wanted to be sure what Arthur was asking for. He wanted to hear this unlikely thing with his own ears. 

With a shift in his weight, Eames’s hand was free to reach down and coax along the emphatic line of Arthur’s arousal, a skimming grip full of promise. His fingers roved freely, barely more than a hint of the relief he wanted to provide, until they came away good and wet, then he withdrew them. He shoved his knee in between Arthur’s legs – Arthur’s breath hitched at that – and bent down to suck his way over the sweat-glossy planes of his chest and shoulder until Arthur started to buck dangerously underneath him.

“Tell me what you need,” he said, one last time, into the tender skin beneath Arthur’s ear. He got a ragged growl in response, and a hand sliding into his hair. “Arthur. Please. Tell me what you need so I can give it to you.” 

The hand in his hair tightened with all the tormented strength in Arthur’s body. Then, in an instant, it melted away.

“Fuck me through this. I need it as hard as you can give it. I want you all over me – hold me down, make me feel every inch of you, pin me down and take it all, take me over and over. I need you to fill me up until I beg for mercy – want to feel you knotted in me, breaking me apart. Want to feel you bare and hard inside me. I’m so wet for you, Eames. I’m ready.”

That last part turned out not to be true, but Arthur writhed and murmured every second Eames’s fingers were in him, and the deepening flush and swell of his cock made its own statement. At first excruciatingly tight, he angled himself up aggressively into the touch until at last the tension started to give way and his body grew as permissive as his sighs. The change was dramatic. Where he had been stiff and unhappy, Arthur’s body opened up fluidly, splayed open without a hint of self-consciousness.

“Easy does it,” Eames said, slipping free to scrabble around for the standard pair of condoms he travelled with. “Almost there.”

For someone with such a rigid professional temperament, Arthur bent like a dream under Eames’s encouragement, thighs practically on his chest. The moment he eased into place, Arthur’s knees tightened around his ribs as if to lock him in. The wiry flexibility of him had the fit of a well-made cage. One hand curled like a steel bracket around the back of Eames’s neck, the other plucked open the last button on his shirt and roamed through the damp hair on his chest. 

“Go on,” Arthur breathed, with a long exhale that eased his thigh muscles that little bit looser. “Do it.”

One slow, clutching slide and he was in, Arthur’s fingers like hooks across his upper back and his mouth garbling incoherent entreaties. When he tried a shallow little stroke, to get them both used to the depth of connection, Arthur groaned so loudly he had to whisper in his ear and hush him. No lie, it always gave him a dirty thrill to have a man who got off on anal, it made the business of fucking that much more heady. But this – the complete surrender of Arthur’s position, the hungry tightening of muscle that accompanied every stroke – this was like nothing he’d been bold enough to dream of. He set up a short, pounding rhythm, and Arthur’s eyes glazed over deliriously.

“Don’t stop,” Arthur whispered, as if the merest thought of it had crossed Eames’s mind. “I need this so bad, so bad Eames.”

He slowed to a languid outstroke and eased back in, dizzy with lust. “Yeah,” he heard himself say. “Yeah.”

It didn’t last long after that. In the first tenuous steps of coming, he propped himself awkwardly on one elbow to get a fierce grip on Arthur’s cock and jacked him hard, to the most meltingly satisfied moan he’d heard so far. His fingers had barely got wet when his own climax smothered him, heavy like a dumped tonne of syrup that dulled every sense. He might have slumped sideways. All his thoughts went out like a quenched match and he slept.

What felt like hours later, he was woken by Arthur extricating himself. The lamp was off. The window was pitch black. He was still wet between his fingers when he shifted them to scratch. 

He closed his eyes and waited for Arthur to move on from where he was perched on the side of the bed. He must have dozed a little more. When he woke, Arthur was still there, hunched quietly. Head too fuzzy for speech, he closed his eyes again, and when he opened them again, he was alone. 

**

Eames emerged from his room the next morning to find Arthur scrubbing down the kitchen: counter, tiles, then sink - every surface that might have captured a trace of them. From the work room came the sound of Lin wielding the vacuum cleaner, before it cut off into silence.

In a plastic bag hanging from the door handle was an apple and a couple of breakfast bars. 

"That's all we've got left," Arthur said as he polished the tap to a gleam. "If you take a shower when you've eaten, I'll go over the bathroom too."

He turned over his shoulder and looked Eames in the eye, in a way that had got unfamiliar over the last couple of days. A team leader making sure the plan had been communicated and received, nothing more. 

"All right then."

"Ready to leave in half an hour?"

There was a crackle of energy coming off him, a sense of unimpeded momentum that had been missing. Eames felt a niggling cramp of tension ease within him. But there was something else, too. He glanced out the window to find the weather was gloomy but dry. The landscape, lightly dusted with snow, looked as still and lifeless as a plastic Christmas scene in a store window. He thought of Arthur's breath against his neck last night, how his fingers had lost their chill.

"We've only got a few hours before the weather turns again." Arthur prompted, and spared a brief scowl at the cleaning cloth in his hand. "The sooner we're off, the better."

In the shower, he closed his eyes and let the suds flow over his face. He stubbornly took his time. Granted, the scenario of "stand-offish co-worker in the grip of somnacin-induced hallucination uses nearest available male as a stud" was rare enough that no rules of morning-after etiquette had been established. But regardless, if Arthur was sufficiently recovered to lavish his most scrupulous care on the clean-up, it shouldn't be beneath him to spare a scrap of courtesy for Eames as well. 

Was he so sure of Eames's latent attraction that he thought he'd been bestowing a favour rather than receiving one? If so, he was wrong. Sure, over their last few jobs, Arthur had climbed higher in Eames's esteem than he let on, but that was a professional thing. 

He slopped out of the water to dig his shaver out of the string-cinched sack that served for a toiletry bag and toweled the mist off the mirror. They were both old enough to know the difference between one thing and the other. Day after tomorrow he'd be back in Africa, in any case. If he left out the names and locations, he had a great new anecdote for slow evenings on his next dreamshare job. If he ever took another. And if anyone believed him. 

When he came back to the work room, cheeks freshly tingling from the razor, his gear was all packed into a cardboard box, snugly assembled like a three dimensional jigsaw that had only been waiting for the right level of expert spatial awareness to fit it perfectly together. The pliers were evenly separated from the utility knife with a concertina fold of paper. It could be an apology or an admonition. With Arthur, probably both at once. 

"If you need something, just say the word," Arthur said out of nowhere, when they were trudging through the first gentle spray of a rainstorm, down the last winding stretch of the track towards the road where their pick-up would be waiting. He watched Arthur shift the PASIV case to his other hand for balance, in a grip like an axe handle, as he picked his way down a rocky step. He glanced up at Eames once he'd found his footing, keeping his voice low. "I shouldn't have let it get out of hand, last night. You had enough to deal with on this job already."

There was a gentle note there that usually wasn't. Sympathy. All Eames's hackles sprang up instantly. "No, this hasn't been the most pleasant commission I've taken."

Arthur turned his back and resumed his journey.

"Like I said. Let me know what I can do to get us square."

He took a breath like he was about to add something more, but it could have just been the treacherous patch of mud they were coming up to.

"You can leave it the fuck alone," Eames told him, a shade too pleasantly, when they reached the roadside. "That's what you can do."

**

It was only much later, settling into a nicely snug train carriage heading for the border, with twenty miles already between them, that Eames felt like coming back to that question. The view through the rain spattered window was warped and pixelated, shutting him in with his thoughts. The cardboard cup of sugary tea in his hand exuded contentment. A pleasant burn outlined all the muscles between his ribs and his knees that had got such a lovely workout last night, followed by a healthy stretch coming down the trail. 

He was inclined to let Arthur off the hook. Sometimes, the effort it took to maintain a grudge was far more painful and disruptive than the original slight. He'd been around long enough to know how to let the anger go, and hold onto the lessons. There was a con he'd been laying groundwork for - a honeytrap of a casino development in Singapore with 150% profit margins and purported presidential endorsement that was just waiting for optimistic developers to pour seed capital into. He could save himself some time by getting Arthur to knock him up a little of the background paperwork, and call them even after that. 

Laying that grievance to rest left him with nothing but the mild dissatisfaction of an unsolved mystery. Something had followed Arthur out of whatever dark dreamworlds lurked in Sara St Clair's mind. The timing of his malady left that beyond doubt. 

He used the opportunity of the train's free wifi to search a few of the symptoms, some of the particular terms Arthur had used in the heat of the moment that seemed a little foreign to his pretentious vocabulary. He spent a long, leisurely time over his research. He made his living by exploiting other people's weaknesses - and the more deeply hidden proclivities were the greatest vulnerabilities of all. Knowledge was currency. And he was not, in any case, wholly disinterested. 

Browsing through increasingly graphic manifestations of other people's fantasies, he absorbed the terminology, the expectations, the conventions. For _omega,_ he read _Arthur._ His tea was cold by the time he remembered it.

**


	4. Chapter 4

The first hint that everything was not quite right had come when he tried to walk away from the airport newsagent without paying for his bottle of water. By the time he approached the check-in terminals, he'd progressed to the familiar physical symptoms: heat under his collar, around his wrists; skin tingling all over with sensitivity. Arthur had kept his gaze on the well-trodden carpet and breathed as shallowly as he could, to keep out the provoking human scents that went to his head like whisky.

Locked in a toilet cubicle, he looked at the tempting plastic bottle of Ambien and wearily put it away. Getting the PASIV through airport security required him to be at his sharpest. The wrong answer - even the wrong _inflection_ \- would see him whisked into the clutches of homeland security as a terror suspect. If things progressed like last night, he'd be in no condition to survive that. 

He sat on the closed lid and slipped out his phone. The kick in his pulse was a bad sign - he knew his stress reactions well enough to recognise this as unusual. But perhaps it would be milder this time. Perhaps Eames had taken the edge off it for him last night. There was no way to be sure, though. Not when his condition was undocumented in the field of dreamshare research. 

He shrugged off his jacket and hung it on the door hook, rubbed the damp inside of his collar and stared at the blank screen. His thoughts were getting linear, primal. It strained his attention to hold two possible courses of action in mind for the purposes of strategic comparison.

It wasn't shame that made his thumb halt as he scrolled through his contact list. He was already as far in debt to Eames as it was prudent to go, and he was not the kind of person who sought more favours than he gave. Obligations were a balance sheet he tallied with care. He held onto that thought and refused to be swayed by the memories of last night that were lurking right at the periphery of his thoughts, waiting for a weak moment to swarm back in. He could practically hear the bed frame creaking under his back again. Smell Eames's naked skin all over himself. 

He took a long draught from his water bottle and forced the sense memory away. His recollection of last night was addled with hallucinations and not to be trusted. What he needed to remember was the other side. How Eames had taken against him from their very first job, from their first cool handshake, even before that lacklustre quarter-hour fuck in Shanghai. But those memories seemed distant compared to the more recent touches that still set his nerves simmering. The strength of Eames's mouth brushing over his nipple, the precise flick of his tongue. The rock steady grasp of his hands. 

"Yes?" came a distorted voice. 

He looked down at the phone in his hand, suddenly showing Eames's number on screen. The damning green handset symbol was lit up. Slowly, he put the phone to his ear.

He swallowed and asked, "Are you still in the city?" 

The pause couldn't possibly have been as long as it seemed. 

"I am, as a matter of fact." 

"I need—" Arthur bit down immediately on the damning quiver in his voice. Eames was a professional and would not be swayed by helplessness. 

He cleared his throat. Even on a good day, it was a dicey balance to strike with Eames, who met even a polite request with smarmy opposition and responded to directions with outright mutiny. Here, Arthur was asking him for a hell of a lot more than a costume change on a forge.

"It's starting again. The same symptoms. Can I—" Shit. Nuance was slippery as a snake in his hands. All he really wanted to say was please. He closed his eyes. "I'm hoping you might be free to — meet up again. I won't take too much of your time. Can I come to you?"

He gave the silence about a second before he started sketching out a back-up plan. There was a half-decent chemist he knew, three states away, who might be able to courier something to him, if he could work out—

"Not here," Eames said. "You book a room. Somewhere central, text me the details. I'll come to you."

"Okay." 

A little while later, he was striding back towards the taxi rank, picking a lank-haired young driver he didn't think was likely to tempt his impaired senses. It was only in the lull of traffic, turning the corner into the street of the Sheraton, that he said softly to the empty seat beside him, "Thanks."

** 

By the second scotch and soda, he was at the window, watching the traffic 26 storeys below, as if he could pick out Eames's cab from among it. They hadn't set a time, exactly, but enough time had passed for doubt to set in. His second text had already explained that he'd upgraded to a suite – this was partly to give himself space, and partly because this diversion was probably going to make Eames miss whatever connection he had lined up – and he couldn't think of any further inducements he had to offer. 

He sat on the neat beige sofa and counted the neat green plastic apples stacked in the centre of the neat beige leather ottoman that served as a coffee table. He thought about the different elements that went into the room, tried to work out how long the build would take a competent architect if he ever needed to adapt this for a dream. Then his gaze snagged on the table under the window. It looked the right height to be bent over, fingers leaving smudgy prints, breath misting the green glass that topped it—

Christ, where had Eames got to? 

Arthur undid another button and took a long swig of his drink. He wasn't going to fight it, this time, since that only made his condition worse. He was going to ride out the indignity and the helplessness, and as soon as his head was clear again, he was going to fly back to Berlin, call someone like Marta or maybe Cobb, and use the spare day before his next client meeting to get this thing fixed once and for all.

He had his head in his hands, trying to keep his mind on remembering what came after calcium in the periodic table, when the entry lock beeped.

"You're here," he heard himself sigh as he looked up.

The way Eames's attention landed on him felt like a snap diagnosis - unflattering.

"The delay was unintentional," he said, resting his bag against the back of the nearest armchair. "I was a little further away than I thought."

He was in a long-sleeved t-shirt with a grey hoodie over the top - none of his usual loud prints. It looked good. It looked so supernaturally masculine on his broad torso that Arthur felt the shock of attraction in more than just his dick.

"Can I fix you a drink?" He made himself open the bar fridge, to give them both the chance to pretend this was something more than what it was. "Vodka, gin, beer, or pre-mixed rum and coke."

He watched Eames empty most of the vodka bottle, grimacing. "You seem in good shape," Eames observed cautiously afterwards. "Considering." 

"Good to know." He could hear his thumb rattling against the counter top above fridge. His cheeks felt hot. Eames fixed himself a tumbler of tap water and sipped it while he checked out the view across the room. 

"We're in the city now," Eames told him carefully. "There are professionals you can call."

Arthur took a deep breath to quell the spike of panic that shot through him. "If you're not going to do this, you should have said. I'm not exactly dealing with a textbook condition here."

He tilted his head back and tried to recollect the resolution he'd reached. Stay calm, don’t fight and keep a clear head for as long as he could.

"If you want out, that's - I accept that," he said. Eames gave a provocative snort, still preferring the office facades opposite to any interpersonal engagement. "I'd appreciate it if you could find - make a booking. For me. My judgment's impaired right now. And I need you to stay, if you can. Put the television on, loud as you like. The room's on me. I'd rather not be left alone with a stranger if I'm about to lose it again - someone who might have underworld connections on top of everything else."

Eames finally turned around.

"Wouldn't you say that's exactly where you are?"

"No," he replied reflexively. When he gave himself a moment to let the question sink in, the answer was still the same. "No I wouldn't. Eames."

The longer he waited, the harder it got to bear the torture of the ten feet between them. He wracked his brains for a way to close the distance. What was Eames's type - coy or direct? He should have paid more attention to what Eames was attracted to. His feet moved practically of their own will, closing the gap to practically nothing.

“What are we doing?” he asked, sounding as raw as he felt. “I need to know.”

Eames’s hand was cool from the discarded glass when he settled it on Arthur’s shoulder, thumb stroking over the inside ridge of his collar bone. The touch worked like him on a drug, settling his scattered instincts. When he closed his eyes, he could picture exactly what Eames’s type was. It was confident, edgy and full of surprises.

He leaned in until his lips were close enough to brush the cartilage of Eames’s ear, and breathed,

“I’m going to get down on my knees now and choke myself on your dick. Stop me if you don’t like it.”

Eames tensed and shifted, as if suppressing a shudder. The feeling was mutual. He smelled so good from close up – the oil of his hair and scalp, the sweat from that walk down the mountain – that it was a struggle to do what he’d promised and sink down.

He paused with his hands on Eames’s belt, gave them both a chance to anticipate what came next. This always got him hot, whether giving or receiving. Kneeling was a declaration of carnal intent, a position full of promise that accommodated one specific action and no other. He slowly slid the belt undone and let its ends hang open like an invitation while he went even slower on the button and dragged the zip down so that each tooth unclasping made its own distinct sound.

Eames glanced away with one of those fleeting smiles that were a rare betrayal of something more vulnerable, but he gave no whisper of protest as Arthur concentrated himself on the delicious process of unwrapping his dick. There was a thick curve straining Eames’s briefs when Arthur slid down his trousers. He dipped down to kiss it, pressed his mouth into the hot give of it, dragged his bottom lip up it as it filled out. Just above his line of sight, the rise and fall of Eames’s chest was speeding up. He closed his eyes for a moment to breathe in the scent of arousal through the damp cloth. 

He peeled Eames’s briefs right down to mid-calf and went to work. In one slow slide, his mouth was full of hot, eager dick, the head of it grazing promisingly over his soft palate. Eames's grunt sounded punched out of him. He changed pace, made a mess of it, got his lips all slick and sighed at each stray graze of cockhead against his cheek or chin. The further he let himself go, the quieter it grew inside his head. The panic and hunger faded away to nothing. So he held Eames between finger and thumb and took him down deep in his throat. Eyes closed, breathing forgotten, he sucked until his mind was clear of everything except the rhythm, the heat and girth, the total obstruction of it. 

But this was never meant to be the main event. As he pulled back, his own hips were already rolling in anticipation of what came next. 

"This isn't what I need," he said in a rough voice. "I need—" He let out a long exhale. It was way beyond him to be seductive in this state, but he wasn't going to insult Eames by being coarse. "Care to step into the bedroom?"

“Yeah,” came Eames’s vague reply. “All right.”

As he walked, jerking buttons free, he thought how good it was to keep hearing those words, on Eames, who usually took malicious delight in defying his every wish. If he said "yes", it usually meant "you're kidding", or "I'd like to see you try", or "you have no idea what's you're in for". But today, when Eames could set any pointed or humiliating terms he wanted, it seemed as if the greater the advantage he had, the less inclined he felt to use it. 

"Here, let me."

Eames's hand settled over where he was struggling with his buttons and brushed his attempts away. One glance at those hands that looked equally comfortable wielding a Mont Blanc or a grenade launcher, and the answer was yes. Whatever was wrong with him responded to that. As Eames gently slipped open the two buttons at his cuff, his mind went quiet, the flames of desperation all blown out. 

When we was stripped down to nothing, Eames said, unhurried, "What do you want? Shall I get undressed or have you right here, like this?"

Both possibilities set Arthur's blood on fire. The need in him was like a rising tide again – far too great for specifics. He could only stare at Eames's hand, hesitating on the loosely re-fastened button of his trousers. The anxiety was seeping back into him, that awful suffocating lack. What he needed was making his head spin with urgency. What he needed was not to be tortured with choices. 

"All right." One hand, one meaty hand on the juncture of his neck and shoulder and the world righted itself again. "Okay?"

Arthur was sick to the bones of being out of control of his body. He needed this fixed, and this glitch in his sub-conscious had taken the solution completely out of his own hands. 

"Eames," was all he could say. "Please." 

Abruptly, Eames's hand was in Arthur's back, hauling him close so he could lean in and whisper, "Here's something, Arthur. I like hearing you talk like that. You can do as much of that as you want." 

As he was pulling back, he kissed Arthur's mouth, an entitled, unhurried sort of kiss that Arthur leaned into with a moan he couldn't hold back. 

"Can we—" he heard himself say, raggedly, screwed his eyes closed and released them. "I need this to be happening now."

"Help me get his off then," Eames says steadily. "Go on."

The hoodie rolled easily over his shoulders. The shirt underneath clung to his body. Arthur had to push it up, the heel of his hand dragging through the warm hair over Eames's chest, brushing the fuzz under his arms. 

"You smell so good," Arthur said dizzily, pressing in close. Eames made an encouraging murmur. "Wild. Like something out of a dream. Too much for one man. God, I want to eat you head to toe." 

Instead, he bent down to run the tip of his nose along Eames's shoulder, filling his lungs with it.

When Eames slipped free of him to sit on the bed, he wanted to whimper. Then he saw that he was unplucking the laces of his trainers, throwing them off, stripping the trousers from his legs. All of a sudden, he was more naked than Arthur had got to see him before, leaning back on his hands as if he knew exactly what he had to show off about. 

He laughed when Arthur tumbled onto him, completely untroubled by the unannounced assault. Skin on skin, it was all too much to bear. He was kissing Eames's neck, biting his shoulder, and all at once reaching down to give him the few strokes he needed to be perfectly, heatedly hard. 

"Hold on." 

"No, I need this. I'm ready, so ready for you."

"Arthur, stop." Eames was breathing hard, shock in his face, when Arthur pulled back. He didn't understand what the problem was. He'd got himself as ready as he could bear during the long wait for Eames's arrival, and all his senses told him he could take this. 

"Please," Arthur said, to an expression of betrayal. "Please fuck me. You don't know what it's like. It's killing me, Eames."

"I know, I know," Eames sighed, forehead against Arthur's shoulder. "One minute. Can you wait one minute?"

Arthur really couldn't, but he endured it as Eames shuffled them along the bed so he could reach the cabinet where Arthur had laid in supplies, what felt like days ago. It was torture all over again, feeling the stray brushes of his fingers as Eames rolled a condom onto himself. 

"Let me—" Arthur's whole body contracted at the sensation of Eames's slippery finger sliding into him. He was partial to fingers ordinarily but this – it was like there were a million new nerve endings down there to suck up the pleasure. His muscles tightened, drew Eames in, craving more. 

"Oh," Eames breathed in a shaken sounding voice, and for the first time, the shocking thought occurred to Arthur that perhaps – unlikely as it was – perhaps Eames wanted this.

"It's not enough," Arthur breathed into his ear. "You know what I want."

A moment later, the finger was gone, replaced by the blunt head of Eames's cock nudging against him. 

Time seemed to stop as he sank down. It lasted forever, the slow slide into fulfilment, Eames stretching him open inch by heated inch. And all those scrambled moments of hunger paid themselves back in pleasure. God, he'd never got off on penetration quite like this. He could feel it in his throat, right up his sternum, all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes, the tremble and throb of possession. The unrelenting hardness moulding his body around it. He was moaning aloud by the time he bottomed out, faintly aware that there were words coming out of him too. Eames was panting against his throat, hands has heavy as stone on his hips. 

"I need this." The words were jolting out of him as he rode Eames's cock, easy at first and then with mounting desperation. "I want to feel you inside me, as big as I can take. I want you to fill me up like I've never been filled before. Want to feel the knot of you inside me."

Then Eames's hands were on him. It took a few seconds of that sure and steady grip before his whole body curled up into the most blinding orgasm he could remember. He had no idea what slipped out of his mouth as he rode it, seemingly endless, simmering and explosive and centred around the hardness of Eames inside him. 

It was impossible to guess how much time had passed when Eames rolled them sideways onto the bed and pulled out. Arthur felt like a wisp of cobweb drifting on the breeze. The panic from before was so distant he could barely remember it. 

At the first slick sounds of Eames laying hands on himself, he struggled to prise open his eyes. 

“No.” His voice was absolutely shredded, like he'd made even more noise than he'd known. “Let me suck you.” 

It took a bit of work to get the angle comfortable, then a little longer to replace the synthetic residue of the condom with the meaty taste of Eames’s arousal. After that, it was flatteringly quick. He barely had to use his hand. If he hadn't been so drunk on endorphins, he might have paid more attention to the sound of Eames's voice, the movement of Eames's fingers as they stroked over his back, his neck. The helpless sound he made when he finally gave it up. 

When he'd swallowed everything down, the barrage of pleasure left him so wrung out that all he could do was slump sideways, his cheek on Eames's thigh, and give himself permission to pass the fuck out. 

**

He had slept with Arthur before, on jobs where hotels were too conspicuous and even sleeping bags were a risky luxury. He slept military style, like a switched-off machine, and turned on a precise axis if he rolled over at all. So he knew it was the lingering after-effects of the inception that made him cling to Eames's upper arm with a distressed murmur every time he tried to leave the bed.

Knowing it was artificial didn't stop him feeling a vicarious flush of embarrassment, though, thinking how grudging Arthur ordinarily was with his affections.

"Hey," he said as he drew his fingers from Arthur's temple to his forehead, down to the bridge of his nose and back up again. Arthur wrinkled his face. "Time to report, soldier. Status update. Come on."

Slowly, Arthur's eyes opened. It took less than a moment to see he'd got his bearings.

"I'm glad it was you," Arthur said, and finally released his grip as he rolled onto his back. 

His voice retained an easy, intimate note. But then, perhaps that was inevitable when a man had practically bloodied his voice box begging to be fucked. 

"I wanted Jane on this job," he went on, with a smile that seemed to be directed at the ceiling. "You'd said you were out for good after the last gig, and she's pretty solid when the money's right."

"Missing a critical bit of equipment, though."

Arthur met that equivocally. "I could have improvised in that department. But Jane, she likes to be in control. She would have enjoyed it too much." He must have caught Eames's expression because he added, "In the wrong way. You know she's still sore at Cobb for the job he bailed on in Geneva when Mal was in labour. She would have been punishing me for fucking up and wasting her time."

Eames let that thought sit for a moment, before he went to the bathroom for a drink. 

"You're a dick about the small stuff," Arthur's musing voice followed him. "But never the big things. Never when it matters."

Eames glanced at himself in the mirror as he filled both glasses. Apart from a couple of enthusiastic marks on his neck and shoulders, he looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit flushed about the face. He'd thought it was the inception loosening Arthur's tongue. But every observation sounded like something Arthur might say on a job. He could practically picture him making a note in one of his Moleskines, neat capital letters, EAMES: A DICK ABOUT THE SMALL STUFF. It was only the delivery that seemed off. 

He had a sense that it was a black and white thing with Arthur. Eames was charismatic on the surface – had worked hard on it – but the warmth was a forge of its own, disarming, obscuring. His real self, if he still had one, was buried pretty far under the surface – to be honest, he wasn't entirely sure what was down there anymore; there were depths he hadn’t felt the urge to climb down to for a very long time. Arthur, on the other hand. Arthur kept everyone at a polite professional distance, but when he opened up, it was a reckless, absolute sort of commitment. 

He rested the second glass of water on Arthur's chest as he made short work of his own.

"So I'm a whisker ahead of Hollywood Jane. Who doesn't actually have a dick."

Arthur looked a little bit bemused, but mostly disbelieving. 

"You want me to give you a star rating? Come on, I pretty much shouted the walls down."

Eames shrugged. "That's only a six out of ten for some guys."

"Yeah, well. It's pretty near a ten for me." He shifted awkwardly, and Eames didn't miss how the movement pooled the sheet a bit more over his groin. "Even when my head's a mess."

Eames was too well versed in the art of flattery to be susceptible to it. There were practically no lines in the English language that he hadn't used himself on a mark, topside or in a dream. But he couldn't deny it got a lot easier to be generous with Arthur when he wasn't running Eames down with every second breath, not treating him like a cowboy fresh in off the range. He didn't want Arthur to stop talking.

"What do you like?" Eames asked.

Arthur gave a smile that looked like pretending to misunderstand, and sipped his water. 

"When you're not accidentally incepting yourself into extreme fetishes, I meant. What do you like?"

That produced a flush of embarrassment. 

"All the usual," Arthur shrugged, and appeared to give it some real thought. "I like not knowing what's coming next. It's good when you find – chemistry. Or not exactly–" He sighed. When he opened his eyes, there was a new glint in them. "Good teamwork. Blows my mind every time."

Eames lay down on the bed next to him, with his head propped on one hand so he could use the other to remove Arthur's drink and then peel the sheet down to his waist.

"You know I don't put on a forge without a little research, right?" He trailed his fingertips across all the skin he'd uncovered. "One thing my research tells me is that no alpha worth his stripes would ever stop at once."

Arthur didn't say yes, but the pick-up in his breathing was obvious under Eames's hand.

"So it got me thinking. Do you think you could—"

"Yes," Arthur cut him off. "Yes I can."

And then he was pulling Eames down on top of him, kicking and dragging at the sheet to get them skin on skin. 

This time, Eames took him slow and careful. Arthur was beautiful on his back, undulating through his spine while Eames held his hands down. "Tell me how you need it," he murmured against Arthur's cheek, and he got his broken, uncensored answer. But it wasn't enough. Eames used his fingers for a bit, pinning Arthur's knee against his chest until the only word left in his vocabulary was "please", and then he switched them sideways and curled into him nice and shallow, turning his ragged pleas into melting sighs of pleasure. "You're killing me," Arthur ground out, his body languid and utterly responsive. "Don't stop. Don't stop."

After that, he got them standing so he could pound into Arthur with his full strength, and the violent things Arthur begged him for then would have been shocking if he hadn't been electrically turned on by every last impossible command. He let his mouth go, and the filthier he got, the more Arthur shivered and opened up for him. When Arthur's hands started skidding weakly across the sheets, Eames bent down and ate him out until his knees were just as rubbery, and then he tried them on all fours, slipping into Arthur as easy as a dream. "Are we done?" he hazily heard himself ask. "Is that all you can take now?" 

Arthur's eyes were closed, damp-lashed. He'd been right to the edge four, five times or more, and the constant stimulation had worn away the last of his self-restraint. "No," he said, his voice wavering perilously close to an all-out sob. "God, I can't—"

"You can, sweetheart. Hold on. Let me give you what you need."

Since Arthur was almost boneless, he eased them down into the sheets, Eames on top of him, raised up on his elbows where he could bite softly at the back of Arthur's neck. With their legs inter-spliced, his range of movement was just enough for a leisurely, shallow in-out slide that Arthur tilted his hips into shamelessly. 

When he shifted his knees and changed angle, Arthur’s throat closed around a groan. 

“Yes?” Eames asked, in a fond, blissed out voice that belonged on someone else. 

“Oh Jesus, yes.” Somewhere, Arthur found the strength to bend his hips up, fighting for the angle he wanted. “I’ll give you anything you want after – fuck – if you just keep doing that.” 

Braced trickily on one arm, Eames slid his hand onto Arthur’s belly and held him in place while he grazed that spot mercilessly, easing away then closing in again as Arthur shuddered electrically every time he hit it square. 

“Like that?” he asked, pausing unfairly because it was absolutely addictive, that lush, heartfelt tone that Arthur slipped into when he was completely overwhelmed. 

“Please! Please, Eames. Fuck me like this forever, don’t stop until it kills me—” 

Arthur gave a soft cry, a tremulous, animal sound, and his hands closed, white-fisted. There was no mistaking the depth of it. Eames felt the wrack and clench of his orgasm everywhere they were connected. It was a long time before his tortured sounding murmurs faded away.

At long last, Arthur gave a breathless, amazed little laugh. "Damn. I've never been able to come like that."

Eames’s dick twitched emphatically and he kissed Arthur’s shoulder and basked a little. He shifted his hips uncomfortably. 

“Keep going,” Arthur said, although his face screwed into a grimace when Eames slid fully back into him. “Work me over, hard as you can. I want you to wreck me, Eames. Tear me apart. Fuck me hard again.”

His body turned out to be uncooperative on that last bit, but he stuck it out gamely, absolutely liquid by the time Eames had finished with him, no trace of resistance left when Eames did his best to grasp the condom rim with trembling fingers and pulled out. 

"Think that will last you long enough to get over the border?" Eames asked, later, as the first neon lights were starting to come on outside.

"You're kidding me," Arthur said, with his usual note of reprimand. "I'll be lucky if I can walk."

It was a sentiment Eames had to agree with, standing under the shower a little while later. He should have been more careful of that old shoulder injury. The badly healed tendon was aching like a bastard, and the backs of his thighs were going to be murder tomorrow. He could handle that, though. Slinking back home well fucked and twenty thousand dollars richer. 

While Arthur took his turn in the bathroom, he managed to find one last shirt that wasn't irredeemably crushed. He helped himself to the beers out of the bar fridge and sat on the neat beige sofa where he could peer into the lit windows of late night office workers and distract himself with speculation. The way to play this was cool, he thought. For both their sakes. If they moved right on without so much as a goodbye, then the benign hand of time would allow them to remember it as a surprising one-night stand, rather than a bizarre mercy fuck that had got badly out of hand. 

The last train north left at nine. He had to get a new ticket, and re-schedule his car hire at the other end. 

When he emerged from the bathroom, the combination of fatigue and physical stiffness made Arthur look more severe than ever, pinched about the face, trousers with a pleat you could cut yourself on. His hair was slicked back, still wet. His lashes looked dark and damp.

"This is a stupid idea, so I'm only going to say it once." He waited until he had Arthur's full attention. "We've got a top-of-the-range PASIV in the room, and you don’t know how long you've just bought yourself before the symptoms start all over again."

Arthur's frown asked him what the fuck he was talking about.

Eames nodded towards the machine and waited for him to catch up. 

He'd never used in-dream forgery to push the boundaries of his sexual repertoire before. Too little opportunity, and someone else's dream was not normally a place you wanted to let yourself go. But he was flush with success, this evening, and not ready to let it go.

Arthur ducked his head, getting it. "I prefer the real thing, thanks."

Eames watched him open the fridge door, close it again, then go back for the rum and coke, which he drank standing up. He ran his mind over some of the most extreme moments his cursory research had picked up, how Arthur had begged Eames to fuck him forever and meant it. How Eames could do things for him in a dream that practically no-one else on the planet could ever live up to.

“Apparently you’ve got some very specific needs, your lot.” Arthur wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingers, left his hand there. “You must have wondered what it feels like. To be taken right to the edge, and then further.”

It was new but not out of his reach, to give himself a few extra inches, make Arthur feel it like he never had before. There was no reason he couldn't sustain himself to keep it up through three or four or ten orgasms. He’d have preferred a private practice run at the knotting bit, but in the heat of the moment, improvisation would carry them through. And Arthur, he was no forger, but Eames had witnessed the strength of belief that enabled him to take down projections twice his size with his bare fists. There was something Arthur took into a dream that subtly distorted its physics, even if he wasn't aware of it enough to channel it into wearing someone else's face. And right now, he had an unshakeable belief that his body was made for being pounded until he crumbled and begged. In a dream, they could be pretty spectacular together. 

All the alarms in his mind were going off - all the gambler's instincts that told him when the head-rush of success was about to turn ugly. But the offer was still there, dangling between them. 

"All right," said Arthur, calmly, in the end. "Show me what you can do."

When they came round, back on the bed, Arthur was pink in the face and still gasping. His mouth, untouched, looked kiss-inflamed and rosy. Every brutal, mind-shattering act that Eames had performed on him was reflected in his eyes. 

"God, please—" he ground out instantly, in a continuation of the passionate entreaties that had echoed through the dream. "Please, Eames, your hand."

The six hours in the dream had schooled him well. He knew better than to touch himself. Eames took his time unbuckling Arthur's belt and uncovering the emphatic, straining arousal behind it. With every touch, his breathing got more tremulous, his bottom lip bitten redder. His memory stuck on how Arthur had practically wept for him, sighs and sweet words melting out of him as Eames's cock grew and swelled inside him, pinning Arthur's back against him as Eames brought him off a third time, a fourth time, until he begged for mercy, then begged to start all over again. 

Eames stroked him dry. It didn't take much work – his hips were straining up off the mattress on the first contact. There was no self-control left in him, not a jot. "I'll give you anything," he was slurring. "I need to come, I need you to make me—"

Bringing Arthur off helplessly, in the little naked V of his open trousers with the needles still in their arms, was, just maybe, Eames's favourite of all. He let Eames kiss him again, afterwards, for about half a minute before he touched Eames's cheek lightly with his fingertips, and closed his eyes, and went out cold.

Eames, nursing the unsatisfied beginnings of an erection, didn't find sleep so easy, even when he'd stripped back down to his underwear. Something kept him back. 

It was interesting how heady he’d found the dynamic between them. What he liked in bed was a partner who knew what they wanted. He wasn't the sort who liked to take control – it meant double the work, and he had no patience for the sort of princess personality that expected to lie back and be worshipped. But he was man enough to admit that he found Arthur’s helplessness beguiling. That was an old weakness of his, someone who defied his expectations.

Arthur rolled neatly in place, knees just nudging against Eames's leg. This should be the best part of the job, just now. The moments after, when he had changed out of costume but not fully back into himself. When he'd set aside both the official forgery, and the unofficial persona he wore for the benefit of the team. When he was between characters. Himself, but more than himself. He was at his freest then, as if he could be anything and anyone. And Arthur had snuck in and caught him there, at his most changeable, when he'd been looking for the next person to become, the next story to mould himself into. 

He wrapped his hand around himself and made his way back to another memory. Arthur sinking down blissfully onto an erection that should not have been anatomically possible, eyes rolling back in his head, exhausted and babbling. _Eames, Eames, I don't ever want anything inside my skin except you._ He played that over and over in his mind, but he was already losing his grip, sinking away. The image faded to black. 

**

It was a strange sort of pecking sound that woke him up. There was sunlight on the far side of the room, where the half-closed curtain let it in. Arthur was sitting fully clothed on the bed next to him, folding paper planes out of the crisp hotel stationery and hitting the opposite lampshade every time. 

Eames stretched, and it happily produced more pleasure than pain.

"You look chipper this morning," he observed.

Arthur dumped his latest model on the side table and swung himself off the bed. He was standing as straight as ever, a professional forever preserving the million-dollar impression of good tailoring, but his limbs moved easily in their sockets. Yesterday's paralysing tension had eased off.

"You want to know why? It's gone. Whatever it was, I'm cured."

"How can you be so sure?"

Arthur's glance slipped down the bed, then jumped back directly. "Because I'm thinking I'd quite like to fuck you if I thought I had another round in me."

When Eames pointed out that perhaps everything was not quite back to normal, if he was still verbalising explicit fantasies, he actually turned away, embarrassed, fingering something in his jacket pocket.

"Look, I'm sorry about that. I don't know how many times you want to hear it, but I'm not taking it lightly. I know what a big deal it was."

"Anyway," Eames continued blithely. "I've heard these conditions can be cyclical."

Arthur looked at him curiously, hesitated, and produced a hotel card with an address written on it. "Well there you go," he said. "In case you want to look me up in between cycles."

"A card," Eames noted. "You really shouldn't have."

"I wasn't in much of a state to pick up chocolates or flowers," Arthur snapped. Then he took a breath and stepped closer. "I could blow you. Not exactly a traditional sort of thank-you."

The smile Eames gave him was meant to come off as sardonic. 

"Go on," Arthur persisted, already shrugging off his jacket. "Let me." 

And all right, that was more like one of the idle fantasies he might have had about Arthur before. Arthur in his buttoned-up day wear, faintly expensive scent wafting off him, clean from his fingertips to the back of his ears, laying his jacket over the arm of the chair. When he peeled back the covers, Arthur’s attention homed in instantly on his dick and stuck there long enough to give it the first swell of interest without a single touch. 

He loosened his tie, unfastened his top button, and then he picked Eames’s dick off his belly and sealed his mouth over the head, a sudden assault of heat and suction and the flittering texture of his tongue. Sweat was pricking across Eames's shoulders, back and scalp by the time Arthur finally hit a rhythm – hit it hard and stuck to it like a machine. A no-nonsense pace that was going to undo him in no time at all. 

Stretching, he could just reach the tube from last night. "Use your finger." 

He didn't usually take it this way, but the past night had left him with that feeling of a heated affair heading into its second or third week. He had the urge to push them into outrageous new positions, to show he wasn't bored yet; to string out the excitement before they went off the boil. He should have known Arthur would be devastatingly good at this when his head was clear. Should have known it was a dangerous thing to let a man like Arthur do to him. He draped his forearm over his eyes and sealed his mouth shut tight, because last night’s intimacy was an illusion born of psycho-chemical affliction and he had no excuse to let himself go the same way. In the cold light of day, Arthur was not his willing omega. He was a co-worker, a professional – and god, his technique was diabolical, glancing over Eames’s prostate unerringly to the same brisk rhythm as his mouth. A few ragged, reluctant curses came out of his mouth as he teetered on the edge and fell, to the sound of Arthur groaning appreciatively around him. 

He kept his arm over his face, afterwards, wallowing in the sleepy bliss of an early morning blow job. He could hear the whisper of Arthur’s jacket lining sliding over his sleeves, the faint slither of his silk tie re-fastening, then the zip of his bag. The gambler in him willed Arthur not to wash his mouth out.

“Check-out’s at ten,” Arthur told him, wielding some sort of packaged wipe on his hand and checking himself in the mirror to suck off the sheen around his lips. "Breakfast is on the way up. You've earned it."

Eames gave him an airy wave, already thinking ravenous thoughts about bacon. He searched out his phone and sorted out his train ticket and his hire car. He put out feelers for a new job, something simple and dirty and absolutely topside. He had always been the sort to look forward, not back.

The card was a neat fit for the window in his wallet, though, and he had a gambler's instincts for things that brought him luck. 

** 

**Epilogue**

Arthur was in Toronto when he finally found time to read Sara St Clair's new novel, filling in half a day before one of their between-job assignations. 

There'd been no hurry to read it, since he'd already walked around inside the plot. Not to mention the fact that his client's knock-off competitor ("Heat and Heartbreak") had been all over the news – creating a storm of approval and outrage over its explicit subject matter. As if that weren't enough, the flames were being fired up by rumours (circulated by the client, Arthur suspected) that "Heat and Heartbreak" had been based on a leaked draft of a Sara St Clair original … or something even more nefarious. 

He was putting himself through the ordeal of reading the St Clair original purely and solely because Eames had hinted in at least two emails that he ought to push the boat out at give it a try. So he fixed himself a green tea and curled up on the hotel bed.

What her writing lacked in literary finesse, it more than made up for with a directness that drew Arthur in. She had a way of striking a character's defining flaw like a bullseye. She didn't say "heatedly inflamed" when she meant "rock hard".

The first half of the book he skimmed with regular flourishes of his thumb on the screen. He'd seen a lot of it unfold before his eyes. But towards the end … the young prince Alexei, the one who'd been left on the tower to watch his renegade lover hurl himself to his death, he turned out steelier than you'd have thought, and found reserves of courage he'd never had to draw on before. By the end, years later, when he confronted the Empress, he was a study in quiet determination. Arthur flushed to recognise the portrait of him: a meticulous assassin in the delicately built body of a pleasure boy.

The flush extended down his whole body when he got to the 19-page scene where the lovers were reunited. Some parts he recollected quite vividly; others tickled his curiosity.

He put down the tablet and headed for the shower. If he was no longer at the mercy of that strange hallucination, he hadn't forgotten it either. He could bring it to mind quickly, if he let himself. For the sake of variety. For the sake of letting down his everyday defences.

From the doorway, Eames appeared to take about a second to recognise his state of mind.

"And hello to you too. Do we need to get the machine dosed up?”

Arthur shrugged off the hotel robe and went immediately to work on Eames's buttons.

“No,” he said. “This is all I need.”

“Mmm,” Eames replied, both hands slipping around Arthur's waist to draw him in and kiss his mouth, his neck, his bare shoulder. “Fine by me. Now tell me more about what you need.”

**

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from First Aid Kit's "King of the World".
> 
> I have to say, so much inspiration for this fic came from completely addictive a/b/o fics I've read (and re-read)(and re-read!) in Inception. the_ragnarok's brilliantly developed [The Revolution Will Not be Civilized](http://archiveofourown.org/works/268993), which I admire for its complicated Arthur characterisation, with so much courage and determination balancing his biological vulnerabilities. Nellie's bite-sized [Divide by Two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/620428/). Whiskyrunner's [Pavlov's Bell verse](http://archiveofourown.org/works/371991). You should read them, or let this be an excuse to re-read them!
> 
> Also, Sara St Clair is definitely played by Laura Prepon as Alex the evil ex from Orange is the New Black, who is the living, breathing personification of the phrase "bite me".


End file.
